For immediate release, Tuesday 19 May 2026, Sydney: Boral Limited (“Boral”) is supporting National Road Safety Week and the delivery of the Ryda road safety program, as part of its commitment to Zero Harm, extending to the responsibility of road safety and better educating drivers and passengers.
Students from Woonona High School will on Thursday participate in the professionally developed road safety program by leading learning organisation and not-for-profit Road Safety Education Limited (RSE). Delivered to more than 780,000 young Australians nationally since 2001, with almost 50,000 students participating this year, Ryda aims to equip students with the tools, habits and behaviours to stay safe on roads as both drivers and passengers.
Road fatalities continue to rise each year, with more than 1300 people killed on Australian roads in 2025, up 1.7 per cent on the previous year.1 While youth road fatalities have fallen by more than 50% since 2000, road trauma is the biggest killer of Australian children under 15 and the second-biggest killer of all Australians aged between 15 and 24.2
A corporate partner of RSE since 2018, Boral helped develop a Ryda workshop topic that sees students investigate the challenges faced by heavy vehicle drivers and how to predict actions they may need to take to accommodate them.
On Thursday, Boral will have a heavy vehicle present at the workshop to help students from Woonona High understand the risks and considerations when sharing the road with trucks.
Participating students will hear from a Boral driver about their experiences operating trucks on the road and have the opportunity to sit in the truck’s cabin to learn first-hand about the risk factors such as truck blind spots and stopping distances.
Boral CEO Matt McKenzie, says: “Boral is proud to support National Road Safety Week and continue our long-standing partnership with Road Safety Education through the Ryda program. With a significant heavy vehicle presence on roads across Australia each day, we recognise the responsibility we have to help improve safety for all road users and to contribute to education that makes a real difference in our communities.
“Programs like Ryda are vital in equipping young people with practical knowledge and strategies and habits to make safer choices as drivers and passengers. By giving students a firsthand understanding of heavy vehicles and the challenges they present, we are helping to build safer behaviours for the future. Our commitment to road safety goes beyond our operations; we remain dedicated to ongoing education and partnerships that create safer roads for everyone.”
Maria Lovelock, Group CEO of Road Safety Education Australia, says: “Each year, the Ryda program reaches tens of thousands of students across the country, helping to build knowledge and strategies that can save lives on our roads. We commend the many schools that prioritise this learning opportunity for their students and are grateful for the ongoing support of our corporate partners, whose involvement is critical to delivering the program at scale.
“Developing safe young road users requires more than teaching vehicle control. It’s about fostering informed decision-making, responsibility, and respect for shared roads. With the support of partners like Boral, we can continue to provide impactful, real-world learning experiences that empower students to make safer choices. Together, we are equipping teenagers to make better decisions, reducing risk, and working towards fewer lives lost or seriously injured on our roads.”
1 Australian Automobile Association, 2026, https://www.aaa.asn.au/2026/01/road-safety-strategy-delivers-worst-roaddeaths-run-since-1950s/
2 https://roadsafetyweek.com.au/road-safety-week
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About Boral
Boral is the largest vertically-integrated construction materials company in Australia.
Our network includes prized quarry and cement infrastructure, bitumen, construction materials recycling, asphalt and concrete batching operations.
We employ about 7,500 employees and contractors across our operations that span more than 320 sites nation-wide.
For 80 years we’ve been building something great in Australia - rarely a day goes by that you wouldn’t pass one of our sites or trucks, enter a building, use a road, bridge, tunnel, footpath or other critical infrastructure that our people and products have helped enable.
