National Traffic Awareness Month: Why Traffic Safety Doesn’t Stop at the Factory Gate

Expanding National Traffic Awareness Month to industrial sites addresses rising worker pedestrian deaths through AI edge vision retrofits.

• By Nathan McKenzie
• Sep 08, 2026

National Traffic Awareness Month usually brings public roads to mind. Campaigns focus on distracted drivers, busy intersections, and the responsibility every motorist carries when people are nearby. That focus is essential, and it’s likely saved countless lives and prevented numerous injuries over the years, but it leaves out another form of traffic that’s just as present in our towns and cities – construction sites, mines, warehouses, and manufacturing environments. 

Forklifts reversing out from narrow aisles, loaders crossing a dusty worksite, yard trucks moving from bay to bay, and countless forms of other mobile equipment that work side by side with people every day. These vehicles may never reach a public highway, but the risks around them are no less real. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, pedestrian incidents involving motorized land vehicles killed 369 workers in 2024, an increase of 19% in one year. And of those deaths, almost half occurred in non-road areas. The figure covers a wider range of vehicles and settings than forklifts alone, but it shows why worksite traffic belongs in the national safety conversation.

For employers, it’s about more than ensuring operators are well trained or whether their safety procedures are up to scratch. Even the most experienced and disciplined operators still have a great deal to contend with, even when safety procedures are followed, because visibility can change, conditions can deteriorate, and pedestrians and foot workers don’t always behave predictably .

Danger Can Hide in The Familiar

Ask anybody who has spent time in a busy industrial environment and they’ll tell you first-hand that traffic rarely moves through perfectly controlled environments. Unlike a public highway that has a steady flow of predictable traffic along purpose built roads designed to optimize safety, worksites have a great deal of variables to contend with – even when it’s a normal day just like any other. A route that was clear at the start of a shift may later be narrowed by incoming deliveries, temporary barriers, parked equipment, or a change in schedule. Noise can mask an approaching vehicle, and dust kicked up from the Earth can obscure warning lights that signal a vehicle is reversing.

Even a high load can be enough to block an operator’s forward view, while racking, columns, corners, and the vehicle itself create dangerous combinations of blind spots that must be accounted for at all times. Combined with the fact that pedestrians are likely to be roaming the site, focusing on picking, inspection, and maintenance, and accidents become less a matter of “if” and more a matter of “when”.

As noted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), many lift trucks cannot stop suddenly, and blind spots are one of the leading causes of “caught in between”  incidents and slowed productivity. Rear-wheel steering also gives many forklifts a wide rear swing, so the part of the vehicle that presents a danger is not always where a pedestrian expects it to be. Standard controls like marked walkways, barriers, site speed limits, mirrors, alarms, training, and clear right of way rules are all fundamental, but there’s one key limitation – they depend on humans seeing, hearing, remembering, or responding correctly every time.

That’s an almost impossible burden for even the most well-trained professionals to bear for an eight-hour shift. It’s time the industry as a whole started considering how to reduce the burden on workers, and increase the intelligence and effectiveness of its safety systems.

Giving Operators a Better View of Risk

Technology plays a very important role here, and it’s come on leaps and bounds in recent years – in many cases, faster than the industry has been able to adopt it. For instance, basic proximity sensors and cameras have been around for years, but while they can sound an alarm when something enters a detection zone, they cannot interpret depth or context. They can’t tell a pedestrian from a stray pallet or stray cone, which makes their usefulness limited. If a system treats every object as equally hazardous, false alarms will sound with such frequency that they become background noise, eroding any confidence workers and operators might have in them as a safety mechanism.

By taking this technology to the next level, and including AI-driven stereoscopic cameras, vehicles will gain a form of onboard “intelligence” that allows them to use contextual awareness to more accurately assign risk to situations as they arise.

Consider a forklift reversing from a warehouse aisle. A worker may be partly hidden by racking and outside the operator’s direct line of sight. A stereoscopic vision system processing information on the vehicle itself  can identify the object as a person and provide a warning or trigger a controlled reduction in speed while there is still time for the operator to respond. Processing at the edge – on the vehicle itself –  is important because the system doesn’t need to wait for information to travel to the cloud and back. Cloud connectivity can support reporting and analysis, of course, but the immediate response must happen where the risk is unfolding.

The same principle can become more sophisticated as systems begin measuring an object’s dimensions in real time. A low pallet, a worker on an elevated platform, and a tall load each create a different spatial problem. Understanding height, width, depth, direction, and distance gives the system more context for deciding whether to warn, slow, or stop. Technology should not replace operator judgment or physical separation, but it can help operators perceive what the vehicle, the load, or the environment has hidden from them.

Improving Site-Wide Safety Through Technology

Every time these systems read a potential risk situation, value is gained. A single alert may be easy to dismiss as an isolated event. A cluster of alerts at the same aisle end, loading bay, or intersection points to a condition that deserves investigation. That information can guide changes to routes, speed zones, storage practices, barriers, lighting, training, or shift procedures before a near miss becomes an injury.

This should be approached as a fleet-wide question, including older equipment. Industrial fleets are often mixed, with machines from different manufacturers and different years working side by side. If added protection is reserved for the newest purchases, the level of safety can vary depending on which vehicle an operator happens to use. But because these technologies are largely self-contained, they can be easily retrofitted to existing fleets, allowing safety to be upgraded without needing to replace the whole fleet.

That’s why National Traffic Awareness Month is a useful prompt to look beyond the road and examine every place where a person and a moving vehicle may cross paths. Awareness and training are essential, but they should be reinforced by site design, disciplined operating practices, useful incident data, and technology that can help alleviate the safety burden placed on teams. Worksite traffic safety improves when operators are given a clearer view of the risks around them and safety teams can learn from the warning signs that would otherwise pass unnoticed.