Mark your calendar, driver. Enforcement agencies throughout North America plan to pick up the pace and combat unsafe driving by truckers and four-wheelers as part of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s (CVSA) Operation Safe Driver Week, Oct. 16-22. The good news: Last year’s effort resulted in passenger vehicle drivers being cited at 3 to 1 rate compared to commercial drivers.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's (FMCSA) "Large Truck Crash Causation Study" cites driver behavior as the critical reason for more than 88 percent of large truck crashes and 93 percent of passenger-vehicle crashes. CVSA’s Operation Safe Driver program was created to help to reduce the number of crashes, deaths and injuries involving large trucks, buses and cars due to unsafe driving behaviors. During the push, there will be increased CMV and passenger vehicle traffic enforcement.
Examples of unsafe driver behaviors that enforcement will be tracking are speeding, failure to use a seatbelt while operating a CMV or in a passenger vehicle, distracted driving, failure to obey traffic control devices, traveling too closely, improper lane change, etc., according to CVSA.
Operation Safe Driver Week is sponsored by CVSA, in partnership with FMCSA and with support from industry and transportation safety organizations, and aims to help improve the behavior of all drivers operating in an unsafe manner – either by or around commercial motor vehicles – and to initiate educational and traffic enforcement strategies to address those exhibiting high-risk behaviors.
In 2015, law enforcement officers pulled over 21,012 CMV drivers and passenger-vehicle drivers during Operation Safe Driver Week. Officers found that passenger vehicle drivers speed significantly more than CMV drivers. Passenger vehicle drivers were issued a warning or citation for speeding 27.3 percent of the time, versus 9.3 percent for CMV drivers.
View more results from past Operation Safe Driver Weeks.
