A last-mile delivery station is a small building wrapped around a large yard. Freight arrives sorted, is broken down into routes, and leaves again on vans and light trucks, often around the clock. The building is the easy part. The exposure is outside it, where powered equipment, vans, roll cages and people occupy the same piece of asphalt and the turnover is measured in minutes rather than shifts.
Forklift Safety Data sells no equipment and operates no stations. What follows is how the risk concentrates at this facility type and which controls hold up.
Why the injury record is worse than the average
The published numbers are not subtle. An analysis of last-mile facilities in New York City found injury rates above 8 per 100 workers against a national private-industry average of 2.4, with roughly 85 percent of reported injuries serious enough to involve time away from work or restricted duties (snapshot 2026-10-14). Federal research into warehouse and delivery work identifies overexertion and bodily reaction as the leading source of serious injury, with falls and struck-by events involving equipment close behind, and it notes that the handling in these operations is often done with pallet jacks, roll cages and hand trucks rather than only counterbalance forklifts (snapshot 2026-10-14). OSHA’s own warehousing material makes the same point about the mix: forklifts, ergonomics, material handling, slips and trips, and robotics all appear in the same hazard list, and the most common serious injuries are musculoskeletal disorders and being struck by powered equipment (snapshot 2026-10-14).
What the site actually looks like
The yard is a car park and a traffic lane at the same time. Vans stage, drivers walk to their vehicles, a tractor backs onto a door, and a powered truck crosses the same space with a pallet. There is rarely a marked pedestrian route in the yard, and rarely enough width to create one after the fact.
The truck fleet is mostly light. Walkie stackers, powered pallet jacks, order pickers and roll-cage movers do most of the internal handling. The powered industrial truck standard applies to all of them, and so does the training obligation, but they are frequently treated as “just a pallet jack” and operated by whoever is nearest.
Contractor drivers are part of the workforce and not part of the safety program. Delivery contractors cycle through the site on routes the station does not own. They are pedestrians in the yard, they load and unload their own vehicles, and they are outside the station’s training and supervision. That is a traffic control problem before it is a training problem.
The dock is a shared work area. Trailers and containers are loaded and unloaded in sequence, often with the driver present and the wheels unsecured for longer than anyone intends. Trailer securement, floor condition and the rule about not driving a truck onto a trailer floor that will not carry it are the same rules as any dock, covered in detail in the loading dock guide.
Roll cages and pallets are the unit load. Cages are tall, top-heavy and on casters. They are pushed and pulled by hand as often as they are moved by machine, they block aisles when staged, and a tipped cage is a crush hazard to whoever is beside it. The packaging is the hazard, and it is usually designed for the customer rather than the operator.
Night work is normal. Volume moves after dark, so lighting, fatigue and reduced supervision all apply at the same time. The general case is set out in the fatigue guide.
Controls that hold up
Start with a yard traffic plan that is drawn rather than implied: one-way circulation where the site allows it, marked van staging positions, a marked pedestrian route from the gate and the driver entrance to the building door, and a rule that powered equipment gives way to people everywhere rather than only at crossings. The wider pattern is covered in the warehouse traffic management plan.
Second, treat every powered truck as a powered truck: training and authorisation for walkie stackers and pallet jacks on the same footing as counterbalance machines, and daily checks that actually get done on the equipment with the least oversight.
Third, dock and trailer discipline: an immobilisation step before loading starts, keys or a restraint, a signal that tells the yard a trailer is safe to move, and a floor check before a truck goes inside.
Fourth, roll cage and pallet discipline: cap how high cages are built and stacked, keep staged cages out of travel lanes, and set a rule about pushing rather than pulling a cage down a slope or a ramp.
Fifth, night lighting and housekeeping as scheduled tasks rather than a complaint process, because a wet or badly lit yard is where a pedestrian gets missed.
Where lanes genuinely cannot be separated from staging, the last layer is detection and warning equipment plus zone-based speed limits in the yard and at the doors. The systems index compares the families.
Where to start
Score the site before buying anything. The Risk Scorer turns traffic, layout and throughput into a ranked list of what to fix first. The choosing a system guide explains how to match a control to a hazard, and the systems index is the reference point for the technology layer. Two adjacent site types are worth reading alongside this one: the e-commerce fulfillment centre guide for the upstream building, and the 3PL warehouse guide for multi-client operations. Requirements by state are collected under state requirements, and the methodology page explains how the figures on this site are sourced. When you are ready to compare quotes, the quote form puts your site layout in front of suppliers who work with delivery networks.