DRIVER MANAGEMENT PRACTICES OF MOTOR CARRIERS WITH HIGH COMPLIANCE AND SAFETY PERFORMANCE

This paper reports on findings of a survey of driver management techniques by motor carriers identified as "best safety performers" in order to identify key practices that affect safety performance. The objective was to systematically characterize these behaviors to make them easier for others to adopt. The survey looked at a geographically stratified judgment sample of the safest trucking companies in the U.S. and asked for driver and vehicle-related practices, especially in relation to training and hiring drivers and techniques to reinforce safe behaviors. The findings suggest the prevalence of certain types of practices among this elite group of safety-conscious firms. They tend to screen consistently in all driver-hiring situations, emphasize pre-service and in-service training for company and owner-operator drivers alike, use an array of training methods, covering a wide range of topics, and give a variety of awards to drivers who show they are safe practitioners. Future research needs to be done to see how strong the connection is between these practices and actual crash rates, driver out-of-service rates, and other measures. This could be done by administering the survey to a random sample of carriers drawn from a pool of poor, fair, good and excellent safety records. Empirical testing of that data would show how closely driver-targeted interventions correlate to overall safety.