Steep descents are a hot-button topic in the transport industry, with no shortage of online debate after any high-profile incidents.
The consequences for the parties involved can often be severe with serious injury and death resulting not only for truck occupants but also for other road users.
It is with this context that NTI has collaborated with transport operators to create and release a package of resources around managing steep descents. The work builds on their prior collaboration for NTI’s ‘Spilt Milk’ project, which saw dairy processors and carriers collaborate to build a library of industry safety and training resources.
These resources were created through NTI’s long established National Truck Accident Research Centre (NTARC) partnering with Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) and the National Road Safety Partnership Program (NRSPP).
As with the ‘Spilt Milk’ resource library, these new steep descent resources have been made freely available to industry.
As NTI’s Transport Research Manager Adam Gibson can often be quoted saying “safety isn’t a competition”, there’s much more to be gained by improving safety knowledge and working conditions, which can lead to improved outcomes more widely across industry.
The steep descent resources consist of three videos, each with a supporting guide or poster. The first video outlines key considerations for a driver facing any steep descent – but before that, one key dependency is the assumption that a driver has been informed of a steep descent on a new run.
This assumption sent Mr. Gibson down a rabbit hole, identifying a shortcoming on data held by road managers, but also more broadly a lack of publicly available lists or data around steep descents.
Following this, Mr Gibson proposed a work program to Austroads, the trans-Tasman research and standards-setting body for road agencies, to address this short-coming. Austroads recently announced that this project would form part of their FY25-26 work program.
“We’re really optimistic about the potential outcomes of collaborating with Austroads,” he says.
“The intent is for that work to largely build on the second and third videos released by NTI, which focus on providing critical information on specific descents.
“Each of these two video talks about where the hill is, where is the last safe place before the top to stop, how steep the hill is and any other unique hazards.”
The outcome of this was videos on two quite obscure hills; Firstly in Koetong in North-East Victoria and secondly Powers Hill in South Gippsland.
While these are key routes in the dairy farm pick-up industry, they’re certainly not of the profile of a Mt Ousley or the Southeast Freeway descent into Adelaide.
Mr Gibson is confident that the same approach will translate will into these higher profile descents.
“What we did was imagine a driver who has a regular run down that hill but is unable to drive it on a particular day, so they’re handing their truck to a colleague. That new driver knows how to drive down hills, they just don’t know this hill. So imagine the discussion that takes place between those drivers in the next two to three minutes – that is what we want to capture in these videos,” he explains.
Each of the hill-specific videos is supported with a simple, single-page summary of the key information, or ‘Hill on a Page’. It outlines the location of the descent, its grade, speed limits, locations of arrester beds in a simple, consistent visual format.
It is hoped that the future Austroads’ project will see similar ‘user focussed’ summaries made available for all steep descents on key freight routes across Australia and New Zealand, with the same information also being made available digitally through journey planning and telematics systems so that no driver has to face going down a hill ‘blind’ in the future.
Read more safety advice from the NTI.
