For immediate release, Monday 12 May 2025, Sydney: Boral Limited (“Boral”) has renewed its longstanding partnership with Road Safety Education Limited (RSE), as part of its commitment to Zero Harm, extending to the responsibility of road safety and better educating drivers and passengers.
Boral has been a corporate partner of the leading learning organisation and not-for-profit since 2018. RSE is behind the Ryda road safety program that has been delivered to more than 735,000 young Australians nationally. It is also a founding principal partner of National Road Safety Week, an annual initiative that aims to highlight the impact of road trauma and ways to reduce it, supported by governments and businesses across Australia and New Zealand, including Boral.
Boral’s announcement coincides with this year’s National Road Safety Week which runs from 11-18 May.
Road fatalities continue to rise each year, with more than 1300 people killed on Australian roads in 2024, a 3.8 per cent increase on the previous year.1 Traffic injury is the biggest killer of Australian children under 15 and the second-biggest killer of all Australians aged between 15 and 24.2
Tens of thousands of students each year participate in Ryda school programs, in which they learn the tools, habits and behaviours to stay safe on roads as both drivers and passengers.
Boral provided input into the development of a Ryda topic that sees students investigate the challenges faced by heavy vehicle drivers and how to predict any actions they may need to take to accommodate them. There have also been opportunities for heavy vehicles to be present at the workshops to help students understand, with a real life experience, the risks and considerations when sharing the road with trucks. Participating students get to talk to a Boral driver and sit in the truck’s cabin to learn first-hand about the risk factors such as truck blind spots and stopping distances.
Richard Pearson, Executive General Manager, Asphalt, says: “We are proud to be a longstanding partner of RSE and the Ryda program. Through the various programs we have helped to deliver, we have seen first-hand the engagement and benefits students have had in talking to Boral drivers and learning about the trucks and heavy vehicles and, more importantly how they can make safe choices around them.”
“As one of the largest suppliers of construction materials in Australia, we have a large heavy vehicle footprint – about 3,500 heavy vehicles – and are on the road everyday delivering to customers. We are committed to better educating the next generation of drivers and passengers with whom we share the road.”
Terry Briss, Group CEO/Managing Director of Road Safety Education, said: “We are pleased Boral has recommitted to its partnership with RSE and is helping deliver much-needed, potentially life-saving heavy vehicle safety education. We need to do more than just teach a young person the skill of controlling and manoeuvring a vehicle. We must also equip them with the skill of critical thinking and appreciation for safety on shared roads.
“Every year, the Ryda program reaches approximately 50,000 students throughout Australia and contributes towards saving young people’s lives on the road. Schools recognise the value of Ryda to their students and are committing in increasing numbers to this educational experience. We thank our corporate partners, including Boral, for their continued support in the delivery of the program. Together, we are not only teaching critical strategies on road safety but contributing to a reduction in road trauma – in short, helping to save young lives and reduce serious injury on our roads.”
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1 Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economic, December 2023, https://www.bitre.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/rda_dec2023.pdf
2 https://roadsafetyweek.com.au/
Photo opportunity: Boral will have a truck and driver at the Ryda sessions held at Camp Clayton, Devonport on 15-16 May at 10.50 to 11.05am, where students will have the opportunity to expand on their classroom learning with real-life experience, sitting in the truck cabin, seeing the blinds spots for themselves and asking a Boral driver questions about the challenges of heavy vehicles. Students can be photographed listening to a talk from a Boral driver and sitting in the truck cabin.
For media enquiries, please contact:
Macrina Lim, FTI Consulting
0430 547 751
macrina.lim@fticonsulting.com
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 360 sites nation-wide. For more than 75 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.