Keep an eye out for green reflectors on the road these holidays

12/10/2024 05:57 PM

If you’re hitting the road on a holiday during the Christmas break, there’s a good chance you may spot these little green reflectors along the way.

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But what do they actually mean, and how can they help you?

Originally intended for truck drivers, here's what you need to know about the green reflectors on the road and how they can help even when you're just driving a car.

What do the green reflectors mean?

The green reflectors were originally intended to signal a safe space for trucks to pull over, rest, check their load, and let faster vehicles pass when driving on a two-way carriageway or single-lane road.

However, they have since been accepted and used by people towing large trailers, caravans, and even people in cars who just want to let the people behind them pass.

There is a basic system to it that all road users should keep an eye out for. If there are three dots, it means a safe spot to pull over is approximately 500 metres away, two green dots mean 250 metres away, and one green dot means you've reached the safe space to pull over.

The difference between the green reflectors and a regular pull-over bay is that the green dots signal an informal bay that is not maintained, and many aren't pathed.

Instead, they are chosen based on the firmness of the ground and the visibility that passing traffic has.

According to road safety program Truck Friendly, the idea was first started by Rod Hannifey, a long-haul truck driver and road safety advocate who became involved in road safety after a near-miss head-on accident with an impatient vehicle.

"[After the near miss] I pulled up for my break and thought: 'What can I do to lessen these problems?' and have been involved since," wrote Hannifey on his blog, TruckRight.

"It is generally recognised that there are insufficient truck rest areas and insufficient money available to fix the problem immediately.

“There are many informal spots used by truck drivers where there is either not enough capacity in current truck bays or where the spacing, location and or lack of facilities – particularly shade in the daytime – sees trucks pulling up on wide road shoulders.

"Because such informal sites are not normally marked in any way and are too easily passed before they can be recognised as a safe place to stop – regular black skid marks often attest to this problem, where a truck has had to brake savagely to attempt to access such a site [they’ve only] seen at the last second.”

In 2000, Hannifey led the first official installations of the reflectors (which were originally blue but later changed to green) along the Newell Highway between Parkes and Peak Hill, New South Wales.

Hannifey has won road safety awards and government support for the project over the past two decades. As of 2024, the green reflector scheme has been rolled out by the Queensland, South Australian, New South Wales, and Victorian governments, but Hannifey has previously told media outlets that he has personally installed around 97 per cent of them.

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