The struck-by mechanism, a pedestrian hit by a moving truck, is one of the most common serious-injury patterns in the federal data on this site, and it is almost always preventable. Prevention is a two-sided job: the operator owns the truck, and the pedestrian owns their own eyes and ears. These ten rules are the operating agreement between the two sides, written for the floor, not for the training room.
Rules for pedestrians
1. Assume the operator cannot see you. Forklifts have blind spots that hide a pedestrian even at close range, especially when the truck is carrying a load. Eye contact does not mean the operator can see your feet. Give the truck room whether or not you have been acknowledged.
2. Make yourself visible. Wear the high-visibility vest, walk on the marked pedestrian walkways, and stay out of the aisles that are designated forklift routes. The vest is not a force field, but it is the difference between being seen at the edge of the operator’s field and not being seen at all.
3. Never walk behind a moving or reversing truck. The operator’s rear view is the weakest, and a reversing truck is the classic struck-by setup. Wait for the truck to pass, or take the marked route around it. The thirty seconds it costs is the cheapest safety measure in the building.
4. Do not assume the horn or the alarm means the operator saw you. A reversing alarm announces the truck, it does not confirm the operator’s attention. Treat every audible warning as a signal to locate the truck, not a signal to ignore it.
5. Stop at intersections and look both ways. The aisle intersection is where the pedestrian alert systems and the mirrors are installed, and it is where the exposure concentrates. The habit that takes two seconds is the one that prevents the event that takes a lifetime.
Rules for operators
6. Know your blind spots and drive to them. Every truck class has them, and the load adds more. Slow down at intersections, sound the horn, and use the mirrors and camera systems that the fleet has fitted. The operator who drives as if a pedestrian could appear at any moment is the operator who does not surprise anyone.
7. Never drive with a load that blocks your view. If the load obscures the path, travel in reverse with the load trailing, or use a spotter. The rules in the OSHA standard are explicit here, and the practice of peering around a tall load is how pedestrians disappear from view.
8. Yield to pedestrians, always. The truck is four to nine thousand pounds of steel; the pedestrian is not. Yield at every intersection, every dock face, and every doorway, and do not use the horn as a demand to move. The right of way belongs to the person who is not driving a machine.
9. Keep speed under control near people. The speed limits on the floor exist for the pedestrian zones, and the zone-based speed control systems exist to enforce them. The stopping distance at walking speed is a few feet; at full speed it is the length of an aisle.
Rules for the operation
10. Separate people and trucks wherever possible. The tenth rule is the design rule: physical segregation, marked routes, and barriers between pedestrian flows and forklift flows prevent more struck-by events than any behavior rule. The Risk Scorer on this site scores the pedestrian exposure in your layout, and the score tells you where the separation is weakest. The ten rules work; the design rules work harder.
The bottom line
The enforcement that makes the rules real
The rules on this page are only real when they are enforced, and the enforcement has three layers. The training teaches the rules to both sides. The observation program watches for the violations, the operator who skips the horn, the walker who cuts the aisle, and delivers the feedback. And the design makes the safe behavior the easy behavior, the walkway that leads where the walker wants to go, the mirror that makes the blind corner visible. The near-miss reporting captures the violations as precursors, and the review tracks the violation rate like any other KPI. The rules that are trained, watched, and designed for are the rules that hold, and the struck-by numbers are the proof.
Every rule on this list traces back to the same fact: a forklift can injure or kill a pedestrian in the seconds it takes to look away. The walker who assumes visibility, and the operator who assumes the path is clear, are the two failure modes that the injury data keeps recording. The rules close both. Post them, train them, and enforce them, and the struck-by rate follows.
