Al S You are right! Australia has no clear defined model to follow & it appears to be the same over there
The industry is sitting on the fence or a dollar each way bet on the subject.
This clearly is not good enough because the owners & users world wide need a clear direction or path to go down.
An operator can be easily confused as to what the rules are where & when.
To use a simile can you imagine what would happen if there were no road rules or traffic lights or the rules were to be diffrent in each locality on our roads - multiplicities of death & injuries on a grand scale.
A study should be undertaken to evaluate each case by the manufacturers & users and should include Safety Professionals but only the professionals with intimate knowlege on the use of forklifts.
Curently safety is being compramised by production schedules & profit margins.
I for one am prepared o call a spade a spade and suggest that an international forum be convened to thrash out the correct model or criteria to be considerd when an organisation or government is adopting their safety policies.
We as industry professionals have the obligation or duty of care to give clear as possible information to all empoyers & legislators.
We can not, must not sit on the fence and have a dollar each way nor can we continue to bury our heads in the sand.

Ok now, lets look at this again!,
Half of the responses are for pedestrians to have the right of way, and the other half says the forklift has the right of way!
This is a very important issue, as pedestrian/forklift fatalities can account for 40% of all forklift fatalities. People are dying daily as we speak because we "the safety experts" can't make up our minds as to which method to use.

Its the fork lift operators responsibilty to look out for pedestrians.
And all wharehouse operatives should be made aware they look out for fork lift trucks.
So 50/50
But i teach drivers to pay attention and give way to pedestrians as the pedestrian do not know the operation of a fork lift.

Lift Truck operators, like all powered mobile equipment must yield to pedestrians. So.....the simple answer is, Pedestrians Have The Right-Of-Way.
Operators must have care & control of their vehicles at all times and exercise "due diligence".
Now, Implementation & understanding is another matter. Pedestrians should be told to yield to lift trucks and watch out for their own safety. A pedestrian could be right, but they could be dead right.
The burden is on the operator to prove that they were taking all the precautions.

Wayne,

I would not blame your marketing, I can say that since we offer free pedestrian awareness training to our training clients and have only had a few take advantage of it - guess we might have to start paying them to do it!

In 99% of the facilities I deal with it is know that the pedestrian has the right of way. This does not mean that they may walk out in front of a lift at will but rather if the two meet quickly the responsibility for the pedestrians safety falls to the forklift operator. In a few rare cases I have seen companies allow the forklift the right of way and instruct pedestrians of this. In either case the pedestrian needs to stay aware of the surroundings and avoid forklifts and the drivers need to be careful around people and keep a watchful eye out. Forklift operators are fully trained but pedestrians usually get awareness training if any at all.

We are finding in our Alberta worksite poll of about 2200 operators so far a 50/50 split between the forklift and the pedestrian. So our conclusion is that nobody really knows for sure. A long standing standard adopted years ago in the larger plantsites is that the bigger machine was granted the right of way. This has now trickled down through to the smaller companies and is widely accepted.

My observation is that it's usually the pedestrian that's granted the right-of-way in most workplaces. I've never seen a workplace with a "no right-of-way" policy or one with a machinery right-of-way unless in an area that's been restricted to pedestrians. In the end it's up to the employer to determine what works best.