High-Risk Commercial Motor Vehicle Drivers and Differential Crash Risk Future Directions

摘要

Recent studies by Lancaster and Ward (2002) and by Dewer and Olson (2002) have shown large differences in safety risk among individual commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers. Similarly, a TRB-sponsored synthesis study (Knipling et al. 2004) of individual differences in risk among CMV drivers found that a relatively small percentage of CMV drivers are associated with a significant and inordinate percentage of the overall motor carrier crash risk. The finding of differential crash risk among CMV drivers along many safety-related personal dimensions actually presents a huge opportunity to the trucking industry and government safety officials. If 15% of the drivers represent 50% of the crash risk, efforts directed at those 15% of drivers could yield significant safety benefits. Currently, kernels of knowledge suggest that certain factors are associated with high-risk driving. However, no comprehensive model quantifies the relative weights of individual factors or elucidates how these factors interact with each other. Further, no one study has included all these factors, nor have they been studied under naturalistic driving conditions. It is certainly possible that some unknown determinant is responsible for high-risk driving, and thus a naturalistic driving study seems most appropriate to determine this knowledge. This paper highlights key findings from the Knipling et al. (2004) synthesis report, as well as future research directions to reduce the high-risk driver problem in truck and bus safety and thereby achieve significant reductions in overall fleet and industry crash risk.