ISO 39001 — road traffic safety management system
The standard for companies with vehicle fleets — what it requires, who it is for and how it is measured.
ISO 39001:2012
Road traffic safety
ISO 39001:2012 is the international standard for road traffic safety management systems. It is intended for organisations that take part in road traffic — hauliers, distributors, companies with vehicle fleets, road authorities and local governments — and it asks one thing: that road traffic collisions are treated as a risk to be managed, not as an accident that just happens.
The starting idea: a system that tolerates human error
The standard is based on the safe system approach. It assumes that people will make mistakes whatever their training and whatever the penalties, so the system must be set up so that a mistake doesn’t end in death or serious injury. Instead of asking ‘who is to blame?’, it asks ‘what in the chain allowed the consequences to be this bad?’
For a company, this means responsibility doesn’t stop with the driver. A delivery schedule that can’t be met without speeding is an organisational decision. A vehicle that is overdue for a service is an organisational decision. A route that goes through a residential area just as children are going to school is an organisational decision.
Who it is for
- hauliers and logistics companies, in domestic and international transport
- distribution networks and courier services
- companies with large fleets of company vehicles
- construction and municipal companies with heavy vehicles and machinery
- public transport and taxi operators
- local governments and road authorities
- any organisation whose employees spend a significant part of their working time on the road
The last item is the one most often overlooked. If your sales staff, service technicians or field teams drive tens of thousands of kilometres a year, the road is their workplace — and the most dangerous part of the job, even though risk assessments rarely treat it that way.
What the standard requires
ISO 39001 follows the logic of other management systems — plan, do, check, act — so it can be combined with ISO 9001 and, above all, ISO 45001. What is specific to this standard is that it requires the organisation to identify its road traffic safety performance factors and to measure them. The standard divides them into three groups.
1. Risk exposure
How much driving is really done. Kilometres travelled, number of journeys, type of road, time of day, distribution across the year. Without this figure, no other indicator has a denominator — ten collisions per million kilometres and ten collisions per hundred thousand kilometres aren’t the same data.
2. Final safety outcomes
The number of people killed and seriously injured. This is the only indicator the standard treats as final, and the aim is always to reduce it towards zero.
3. Intermediate safety outcomes — what the company can actually influence
- travel speed and compliance with speed limits
- route choice and journey planning, including avoiding unnecessary journeys
- the condition and safety equipment of vehicles, and regular servicing and roadworthiness tests
- the use of seat belts, child seats and protective equipment
- driver fitness — fatigue, working hours and rest, alcohol, medication, distraction by phones
- driver competence and licensing
- what happens after a collision — first aid, reporting, learning lessons
- taking vehicles and drivers that don’t meet the requirements out of service
This is the core of the standard. A company can’t change the state of the roads or the behaviour of other road users, but it can change its schedules, routes, vehicles, training and rules — and that is exactly what is measured.
What implementation looks like
- Measuring the starting point. Kilometres driven, records of collisions and damage in past years, insurance costs, days when vehicles were unavailable, traffic offences. Most companies have this data scattered across three departments and never added up.
- Risk analysis by type of driving. Driving a lorry at night on an open road isn’t the same risk as urban deliveries.
- Objectives and rules. A road safety policy; rules on phones, alcohol, fatigue and speed; criteria for buying and maintaining vehicles; rules for planning routes and deadlines.
- Training and putting it into practice. Drivers, dispatchers and managers — dispatchers matter most here, because they make the schedule.
- Monitoring, investigating incidents and management review, followed by the certification audit if certification is the goal.
What the company gains
- fewer collisions and fewer days with vehicles off the road
- lower insurance premiums and lower claims costs
- a lower risk of employer liability when a collision happens at work
- better records of drivers’ working hours and rest
- evidence in tenders, especially in public procurement and with foreign clients
- an argument in negotiations with your insurer, because the risk can be shown in figures
How it relates to the law and to other standards
ISO 39001 doesn’t replace legal obligations. Serbia’s Law on Road Traffic Safety (Zakon o bezbednosti saobraćaja na putevima) and the regulations on occupational health and safety still apply in full — the standard is a framework that links those obligations into a system and adds measurement and improvement.
It combines most naturally with ISO 45001, because a road collision during work is a workplace injury, and with ISO 14001, because more sensible route planning also reduces fuel consumption and emissions. If the company has ISO 9001, the shared documentation and internal audits don’t need to be done twice.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need it if our fleet is small?
Probably not the certificate. But rules on fatigue, phones and route planning make sense even with five vehicles, and they can be introduced as part of your existing occupational health and safety system, without separate certification.
What if the vehicles belong to our employees, not to us?
The standard covers that situation too. If a private vehicle is used for work, the risk is a business risk — so the rules on maintenance, insurance and driver fitness apply in the same way; they are just demonstrated differently.
Where can we find official road collision data for Serbia?
It is published by the Road Traffic Safety Agency (Agencija za bezbednost saobraćaja) in its annual statistical reports on road safety.
How STANDARDISO helps
We set up the system from measuring the starting point to the internal audit: risk analysis by type of driving, rules that dispatchers can apply, indicators tracked monthly, and preparation for certification. If you already have ISO 45001 or ISO 9001, we build on your existing system. Everyone on our team works in English, and we can prepare your documentation in English, Serbian or both.