employee awareness and training in their surrounding environment might be the key to help prevent lift truck / pedestrian accidents.

I've been a lift truck tech for over 30 yrs and in almost every case when a pedestrian gets hit by a lift truck the problem generally points to carelessness and just not paying attention to the surroundings in high lift truck traffic areas.

The layout of where pedestrians can travel versus where lift trucks travel should be clearly separated using barriers, safety chain fences etc. Floors marked with the proper signage etc etc.
ALL employees thoroughly trained in plant safety and all lift operators trained in plant traffic lane orientation. Also putting travel alarms on the lifts so they will sound off where ever they are in the plant so pedestrians will know where they are or can hear them coming so they can get out of the way.

Although while altering the lift's mast to achieve a better view may help greatly in one respect, it still will not ultimately prevent the problem from happening. You may achieve better results but like edward hit on.. you simply cannot 'idiot proof' a situation when there are better 'idiots' born everyday. For every action taken there is always a reaction nobody expected, this is true for everything in life.

Sure you can put new masts on the trucks and solve one problem but you create another one by limiting the ability to carry and lift loads that in some cases that you will need, so if you think about it, does this really solve the problem?

Since most masts are built during lift production by order generally the lift mfg's just don't have a stockpile of different types of masts laying around for sale, you would have to order the mast and there is a waiting period to wait for them to be built.
Sure you can have masts built custom to suit your needs but is that costly solution the answer? maybe.... then again maybe not.

workplace safety is a big issue and over the past few years i have seen it escalate to the forefront of every venue in this business greatly. The driving force behind this of course is to make sure the work environment is safe for every employee in every aspect of the job. Nobody wants to get hurt, but unfortunately the unseen reason driving this issue that takes almost as much precedence as employee physical safety, health and well being is the insurance costs every time there is an accident. But one of the biggest mistakes i have seen is the employer taking the 2nd avenue by looking at the situation at face value and not really taking a look at the real reason the problems happen. Like edward says, you can knock down the wall and that may solve one problem, but that is just one obstacle taken down out of several others and does not really solve the real issue.

So in my opinion
- retrain your lift operators
- retrain your employees (non lift operators)
- reorganize your lift traffic areas and make sure all signage, floor markings, barriers etc are in place.
- make sure all lifts and traveling machines have clearly audible travel alarms that can be heard clearly while the machine is moving.

If by chance you already have these things in place and are still having accidents, then by all means try the different masts. But then after you have (still) another accident like this go back and re-evaluate the situation and get rid of the irresponsible employee that caused the problem.