The traffic cone feels like such a simple addition to a site that you’re trying to keep safe, but it’s a feature that’s easily recognizable to all who see it. It sends a clear and immediate message; it's a warning, both in a general sense and in terms of where you should be looking to avoid.
When you’re trying to apply your own workplace solutions, it’s natural that you might look to the most advanced or state-of-the-art options, but it’s important to remember that simple is often effective, and that’s where the traffic cone shines.
Here is a guide on enhancing safety protocols with the use of traffic cones.
Make Sure You Have Enough
Of course, in a large worksite, one single traffic cone is just going to get lost, meaning that it will not be enough to do the job. While you have to work with what you’ve got, and tactical usage of those tools can be efficient, you need the people you’re trying to warn to be able to actually see the cones in the first place.
A simple solution to this is to make sure that you simply have enough of them. While you don’t want to completely litter your worksite with cones (as this might ultimately just make them a hazard themselves) you want them to send the right message – whether that’s to simply redirect people or to make them aware of a potential hazard.
Make Sure You Have the Right Kind
Believe it or not, there are multiple kinds of traffic cone that you can deploy. Different options are going to be designed with different situations in mind, and you might find that those designed to catch the attention of anyone looking at them are the most effective – perhaps utilizing high visibility equipment to make them more visible at night.
This might mean that you have to dig into the specific purpose that you had in mind for them – are you specifically looking for traffic safety cones, or are you looking for cones that might suit a construction site more specifically? That’s not to say that one can’t suit the other occasion in a pinch, but knowing the strengths of the different options might help you to feel more comfortable about the safety precautions that you’ve taken.
Use Them to Save Staff Time
While you always have the option of deploying one of your on-site workers to redirect the flow of traffic around the work that your team is undertaking, that might mean negatively impacting your productivity. If you’re hoping to simply cordon off an area and redirect the flow of foot or vehicular traffic, traffic cones will do the job just as well. Again, it’s a simple approach, but one that can be very effective when done right because of the clear visual communication. Blocking off an area creates a new route for people to follow – but that does mean that you have to be careful not to introduce new problems through what you’ve blocked off. This might sometimes mean that you’ve got to use temporary traffic lights to make up the difference.
