Walking the Circle of Safety
What is the Vehicular Circle of Safety?
Pretty much what it sounds like … circling your vehicle as a safety check before you drive it.
The ‘Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety’ website has a comprehensive checklist and a diagram of what to check for. Although it is directed at company vehicles, the Circle of Safety is definitely not limited to that – we all learnt about the circle check when we prepared for our driver licence tests. Ergo, this is something we should all be doing with our personal vehicles too!
Why do it?
Well, apart from the obvious, i.e. is the vehicle in a fit state to be on the road, doing this has the effect of increasing driver safety awareness. Some companies insist on the positioning of traffic cones around their vehicles so that drivers are ‘forced’ to ‘walk the circle’ as they remove the cones.
The example below is a VERY good reason for at least checking that there are no children or animals anywhere near your vehicle.
Source unknown, but thanks to Morkel for bringing it to my attention!
Some material worth looking at:
- Childsafe – website for the campaign of the Child Accident Prevention Foundation of Southern Africa (CAPFSA) and Safe Kids Worldwide
- Driveway Run-over Injury Prevention Videos – made available by the New Zealand chapter of Safekids
- Prediction on child road fatalities in Africa by 2015
If you’re not already walking the Circle of Safety, why not start today? It’s the SMART thing to do.
Be safe – the SIMPLY SMART way,
Jürgen
