Reaprovisionamientos o Reposiciones

Based on the results from the literature study, accident data analysis, field works and qualitative interviews on relevant risk factors, we conducted a small-scale survey to examine the prevalence and perceived importance of the identified risk factors among Norwegian and foreign HGV drivers.

Recruitment of respondents

Survey interviews with foreign drivers, May 2014

The respondents were recruited in two different ways. The foreign drivers were recruited by research assistant and student Gunhild Meyer Levlin at rest stops, terminals and parking lots in the South Eastern region of Norway in May 2014.2 _The

drivers were interviewed by means of a tablet device connected to our online survey. The survey was available in four languages, and Levlin also had paper versions of the survey with her, in case there were more drivers present who wanted to answer the survey.

In practice it took minimum thirty minutes for the respondents just to answer the survey. Including introduction and closure of the interviews, most of the interviews with the foreign drivers lasted for about one hour.

Levlin spent a total of 105 hours looking for foreign drivers over a period of 15 days in May 2014, and she drove a total of 1327 kilometres. As each interview lasted for about one hour, she spent approximately 74 hours talking to 69 foreign drivers and five Norwegian drivers in or outside their vehicles.

Drivers were asked to answer the survey themselves by means of the tablet, or Levlin would interview them using the tablet. In both cases, the tablet was used to access survey links with the survey in different languages. The survey and the introductions were distributed in Norwegian, English, Polish, Lithuanian (cf. Appendix 3). There were introductory texts in the beginning of each web survey, explaining the purposes of the surveys and stressing that the surveys were confidential.

Each time Levlin approached a supposedly resting foreign driver, she said:

«Hi! I am a student writing a thesis on foreign drivers in Norway. I would like to ask you some questions on safety and working conditions. The survey is anonymous, and neither you, your vehicle or your company will be identified. I cooperate with The institute of Transport Economics in Norway, which also will use the data from the survey. It will take about fifteen minutes to complete the survey».

2 _{Meyer Levlin used the data on the foreign drivers in her bachelor thesis on Emergency and Risk}

The purpose of this introduction was to introduce herself as a student, and not a representative of Norwegian authorities. Each time she also answered drivers’ questions about the survey and explaining more about its context before the survey interviews.

The drivers who were unwilling to answer either could not answer because of their language, or because they did not have time or because they did not want to. According to her estimates, a total of 33 % of the drivers that she approached were unwilling to answer the survey, giving her a response rate of 67 %. Most of the drivers who were unwilling to answer were unwilling because she did not have the survey available in their language (19 %). Only 14 % of the drivers that she asked were unwilling to answer for other reasons.

Thus, Levlin’s sample is shaped by the survey languages available. Drivers who did not talk a Scandinavian language, English, Polish, Lithuanian or Finnish3 were excluded from answering. The sample is also shaped by the fact that the drivers by and large were recruited in resting areas in South East Norway, and near the E6-road, which is the main north-south road in Norway. Levlin tried not to visit the same place each time, in order to try to recruit a heterogeneous sample.

This method is more time consuming than sending e-mails through a company, for instance, since the interviewer must find drivers who will answer the survey and either interview them personally, or be nearby as they answer the survey, as they normally answered by means of a tablet device.

Another challenge with this approach to recruiting foreign drivers is that it requires a person who is able to quickly establish trust with the foreign drivers. It was

important that the respondents understood that the interviewer was not a

representative of Norwegian authorities, that the survey was anonymous, and not least that the survey was a serious project that was worth spending time on. Given the small share of drivers who declined to participate in the survey, it seems that Levlin was successful when it comes to communicating this to the drivers.

One of the main strengths of our chosen way of recruiting foreign drivers in resting areas, and without going through their “superiors” is that we hoped to avoid “strategic answers” from the respondents, fearing that negative results could reflect negatively back on themselves and their contracts (We return to this in chapter 16).

The Norwegian I sample

The Norwegian drivers in the sample were primarily recruited through a web link to the survey on the website of the Institute of Transport Economics. The web link was introduced on the website of the project “Work related transport accidents”, which was a sub site on the Institute of Transport Economics website. A link to this site was also presented on the Facebook website to members of the “Norwegian cabotage study”, which is a group for fans of a study attempting to map cabotage driving in Norway. We used this Facebook site, as we assumed that most of the members would be Norwegian HGV drivers.

The introduction text did not tell the respondents that the data was collected on behalf of the Safe Foreign Transport project (SAFT), or that their results would be compared to those of foreign drivers. The reason is that the issue of foreign HGV

3 _{Levlin also speaks Finnish, and could therefore translate questions to Finnish if Finnish drivers were}

drivers in Norway is a politically debated issue, generating considerable incitement among the involved parties. The Norwegian drivers answering the survey are to some extent competing in the same market as the foreign drivers in the survey. As the Norwegian drivers (especially those accessing the survey link from the Facebook site) would have an interest in giving strategic answers in order to score better in the survey than foreign drivers, they were not informed that their results would be compared with those of foreign drivers.

Instead the website with the survey link was titled “Study of safety culture, winter driving and working conditions”. Moreover on this website, respondents were informed that:

“If you are a HGV driver, we hope that you will participate in a study! The Institute of Transport Economics is conducting a survey aimed at HGV drivers in Norway. It will take you about fifteen minutes to answer the survey. The Institute of Transport Economics conducts the survey in conjunction with a research project financed by the Norwegian Research Council, LINK.

Questions or comments can be directed to Tor-Olav Nævestad. Thank you very much in advance!

The project link on the website was to an actual research project financed by the Norwegian Research Council, focusing on work related accidents in road, sea and air transport. We placed the link to the survey on this website, as we also intended to use the small-scale survey data in this research project, focusing on work related

transport accidents. The fact that the Norwegian drivers in the Norwegian I sample generally did not “score better” than the foreign drivers, except when it comes to winter driving, seem to indicate that they did not give strategic answers.

Survey themes and questions

The surveys included questions on the following themes:

1) Background variables related to age, nationality of driver, vehicle and company, employment status, company size and whether the drivers own the trucks

themselves.

2) Winter driving: 11 self-developed questions related to e.g. exposure to Norwegian winter roads, need for towing assistance, drivers’ perception of risk and feeling of mastery, winter tyres and snow chains, loading of the trailer on winter roads and winter driving training. These questions were developed by Tor-Olav Nævestad and Gunhild Levlin.

3) Five of 25 questions on safety culture from the GAIN-scale on safety culture that we have used in previous research (Bjørnskau & Longva 2009; Nævestad &

Bjørnskau 2014). The GAIN-scale is presented in the ”Operator’s Safety Handbook” (GAIN 2001).4 _{The questions focus on safety commitment, safety training and}

reporting routines.

4) Six of 20 questions on work related factors known to influence the traffic safety of professional drivers (Nævestad & Phillips 2013; Nævestad & Bjørnskau 2014). The

4 Global Aviation Information Network (GAIN) is a voluntary association of airlines, manufacturers, trade unions, governments and other organizations in aviation. The purpose of GAIN is to produce and distribute relevant information to increase safety in aviation. GAIN was established in 1996 based on an idea that dissemination of experiences and knowledge of safety-related factors could improve aviation safety. The purpose of the GAIN manual is to help operators to start, improve and expand their internal safety programs.

questions focus on for instance vehicle safety, and different transport safety behaviours.

5) Questions on exposure (1000 kilometres driven) and accident involvement in the last two years, which also have been used in studies of professional drivers

(Nævestad & Bjørnskau 2014).

6) Questions on driving and working hours, fatigued driving and falling asleep behind wheel, which also have been used in studies of professional drivers (Nævestad & Bjørnskau 2014).

7) Questions on responsibility for (un)loading, fixed salary, origin and destination of trips and how the respondents got their cargo. These questions were developed through a cooperation between the research institute FAFO and the Institute of Transport Economics (cf. Steen Jensen et al. 2014).

8) Questions related to measures: knowledge of the Donna Diesel campaign and whether the respondents have smart phones and if they would like to register their phone numbers in order to receive vital driving information on their phones, or whether they would download an app providing this information. These questions were developed by Gunhild Levlin.

Description of the samples

In Table 2.2 we present shares for driver nationality, their vehicle registration countries and their employment countries, distributed according to three geographical regions and one category for unknown.

Table 2.2 Nationality of drivers, vehicle registration country and driver employment country

Region Driver nationality Vehicle reg. country Driver employ. Country Norwegian I: 47 % 61 49 % 64 49 % 63 Western European Countries (WE): 13 % 17 15 % 20 15 % 19 Central/Eastern European countries (CEE): 40 % 52 28 % 37 31 % 40 Unknown: 0 % 0 7 % 9 6 % 8 Total: 100 % 130 100 % 130 100 % 130

In order to be able to compare the groups statistically, with an N of 130, we divided respondents into three groups. We see that nearly half of the drivers and vehicles in the sample are Norwegian, and that half of the drivers are employed in Norway. The other groups of drivers were from Central/Eastern European countries (CEE).

The group of drivers from “Western European countries” (WE) is unfortunately small. This group actually consists of 8 drivers from Nordic countries and 9 drivers from other European countries (mostly from The Netherlands). This group is generally too small to make any solid conclusions about this group in our analyses. The small size of the WE group reflects the limited kilometres driven of these foreign drivers on Norwegian roads. The kilometres driven of Other EU15 countries made up 1 % of the kilometres driven with HGVs in Norway in the period 2007- 2012 and 18 % of the kilometres driven with foreign HGVs in Norway. Moreover,

only 2 % of the inspected HGVs in the NPRA’s winter inspections in 2015 were from Western Europe, while 20 % were from Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, it may seem that the low share of Western European drivers in our sample to some extent reflects the fact that this group also has a relatively low share of drivers on Norwegian roads.

Nævestad et al (2014: 17) indicate that transport with HGVs from CEE countries is increasing in Norway, at the expense of Nordic and Western European HGVs. The group of drivers from CEE countries was established because of a small sample of foreign drivers. Other publications (e.g. Nævestad et al 2014) discern between “older” (Poland, Baltics) and “newer” (Romania, Bulgaria) EU members from Central Eastern Europe. In this sample, however, we group all these countries together. Nævestad et al (2014) did not find significant differences in the accident risks of HGVs from “older” and “newer” EU members from Central or Eastern Europe in Norway. The group of 52 drivers from CEE countries are distributed among the following nationalities: 29 Polish, 16 Baltic (mostly Lithuania), and the rest from Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia.

Below, we look at drivers’ age groups, company size and their employment status distributed according to their nationality.

Figure 2.1 Respondents’ age groups, distributed according to their nationality.

Figure 2.1 shows that Norwegian drivers have the largest share of drivers over 56 years old, while 60 % of the drivers from CEE countries are 45 years old or younger. The latter group has the largest share of younger drivers. A Chi-square test shows that the differences are not statistically significant (P=0.599).

Nationality of respondents, vehicles and companies

Figures 2.2 and 2.3 indicate vehicle registration countries and driver employment countries distributed according to driver nationality.

8% _6% 10% 18% 24% 27% 28% 24% 23% 26% 41% 33% 20% 6% 8% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Norwegian Western European Central/Eastern European