AAA Foundation research finds driver fatigue to be serious, underreported impairment
WASHINGTON, D.C. According to new research from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, more than one-in-five (21 percent) fatal crashes involve driver fatigue. These results help confirm what safety experts have long suspected: the prevalence of drowsy driving is much greater than official statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) currently indicate. As daylight saving time ends and evening commutes darken, AAA urges drivers to recognize warning signs of driver fatigue and take action to avoid tragedy during this holiday season.
“This new research further confirms that drowsy driving is a serious traffic safety problem,” warned Peter Kissinger, President and CEO of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. “Unfortunately, drivers often underestimate this risk and overestimate their ability to combat drowsiness behind the wheel.”
The report also found that drowsy driving crashes, a mainstay in recent headlines, are not without consequence. One third of crashes involving a drowsy driver result in injuries and more than 6,000 fatigue-related crashes each year result in at least one fatality.
Previous research from the AAA Foundation revealed that young adult drivers, ages 19-24, are the most likely to admit to driving while drowsy, with 33 percent reporting doing so in the last month. In contrast, the oldest drivers (ages 75+) and the youngest (ages 16-18) were the least likely to report the same offense.
“Despite the fact that 95 percent of Americans deem it ‘unacceptable’ to drive when they are so tired that they have a hard time keeping their eyes open, more than 28 percent admit to doing so in the last month,” continued Kissinger. “Like other impairments, driving while drowsy is not without risk.”
AAA urges drivers to understand the warning signs of drowsy driving:
• The inability to recall the last few miles traveled;
• Having disconnected or wandering thoughts;
• Having difficulty focusing or keeping your eyes open;
• Feeling as though your head is very heavy;
• Drifting out of your driving lane, perhaps driving on the rumble strips;
• Yawning repeatedly;
• Accidentally tailgating other vehicles;
• Missing traffic signs.
When faced with fatigue, AAA urges drivers to find a safe place to pull over if experiencing any of the drowsy driving symptoms. To remain alert and be safer behind the wheel, AAA suggests:
• Get plenty of sleep (at least seven hours), especially the night before a long drive;
• Drive at times when you are normally awake;
• Schedule a break every two hours or every 100 miles;
• Avoid heavy foods;
• Travel with an alert passenger and take turns driving;
• Avoid medications that cause drowsiness or other impairment; and
• Consult with a sleep specialist or other medical professional if you have trouble getting enough rest or are chronically fatigued.
The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety’s Prevalence of Motor Vehicle Crashes Involving Drowsy Drivers report is based on the analysis of a representative sample of 14,268 crashes that occurred in years 2009 – 2013 in which at least one vehicle was towed from the scene.
Safety & Compliance: Preparing For a Crash – Article – TruckingInfo.com.
Every Safety Director that I know lives in dread of a school bus accident. The thought of one of their trucks getting tangled up with a school bus is a nightmare, regardless of which driver is “at fault.”
Every employee of your company, from the CEO to each of your drivers, is a compassionate human being. No one wants to see a child hurt. Worrying about a school bus accident can make you, a dedicated and professional Safety Director, an unhealthy insomniac. In order to get some sleep (after reviewing your truck driver hiring practices), you should develop your own company’s media plan.
You say that you are too small of a company to have a fancy “media plan”? Hopefully, you will never need such a media plan. But, if a noteworthy crash happens on your watch, you (as the Safety Director) will likely get pushed into the media spotlight. Being prepared and being empathic might determine if you retain your job after a noteworthy accident.
A media plan does not have to be complicated or outsourced to a high-priced media consultant. Simplicity is the key for you to remember your plan and then to implement it. A media plan has one purpose with five distinct components.
Purpose: The purpose of your media plan is to professionally identify your company as a safe and committed group of people. The media must tell a compelling story very quickly. All media – television, radio, newspaper and internet news – works off of the same newspaper article structure:
Who, What, When, Where and How.
The 5 components of your plan
Who #1 – Talk with your CEO and all department managers about your plan. Make certain that they all know the identity of your media representative. Typically, the CEO or the Safety Director is the natural choice for this important responsibility. Make certain the other company employees know that they should NOT interact with the media and that they should direct the media to you.
Who #2 – When first talking to the media, identify your company without giving the name of your involved driver. Your driver should be protected, at least initially. Have information on company’s history and safety record ready to impart.
What – Provide the basic details of the facts of the loss without inflammatory language. Know the type of accident it was (i.e. rear-end, overturn, t-bone) and exactly how many vehicles were involved. Do NOT speculate on the number of people injured or killed.
When – Much like the component of “what”, the “when” involves more details of the accident facts including at what time the accident occurred.
Where – Details of exactly where the accident occurred and possibly the name of any hospitals where the accident participants were transferred.
How – Do NOT guess or speculate as to the cause of the accident. Resist the temptation to tell everything you know. You can honestly answer questions without divulging the preliminary contributors to a crash until a full investigation is completed. You should be prepared to say: “We are not prepared to comment on the cause of this accident. We are working directly and actively with law enforcement officials to do a full investigation. It would be irresponsible for us to comment on the cause of the accident until all factors are fully investigated. We are aware that in many serious accident situations, in many cases the first reports prove to be inaccurate.”
Write it and follow your outline. Prepare a written outline with the basics of your company’s data. You are less likely to be misquoted if your statement is in writing. Avoid using industry slang or trucking buzz-words, as the general public does not understand trucking terms or trucking operations. Before meeting the media, practice what you want to say with a trusted staff member.
The basis of your initial statement should be a sincere care and concern for the accident participants and their families. You could refine this basic outline of your media statement: “The employees of ABC Trucking are shocked and saddened by this tragic accident. We offer our thoughts and prayers to all the accident participants and their families. We are diligently investigating all the facts of this accident. Additional details should be available shortly.”
Remember, you do not have to answer every media question in order to prove that you are a professional. I recommend that you tell your media contact that you have a statement, but do not have answers to all of his/her pending questions. Don’t say “no comment,” but do not get enticed into speculation. Recognize that there could be some uncomfortable pauses in the questioning. Don’t feel pressured to keep talking.
If you have sufficient time, coordinate your initial media contact with your defense counsel and your insurance company. These entities typically recommend that your company say nothing. However, a prepared statement of empathy and concern might be in your best interest.
Andy Sievers
Sievers Safety Services, LLC
Mahomet, IL
ajsievers@mchsi.com
(217) 714-1960
Many transportation companies struggle with how much time and money to spend on safety. They say the right things like, “Safety is number one,” or “Safety is our highest priority.” However, their actions may not match their words. That’s because safety, and the processes by which better safety results are achieved, are often misunderstood.
Try this test… Ask a few of your key people if they are running a safe operation. We can almost guarantee they’ll say, “Yes.” Next, ask them to define the word safety. We bet you’ll get a lot of different answers but few will be right.
Most people don’t actually understand what safety is. In fact, very few people can even define the word. You may wonder, “Why is it important for us to define safety the same way?” Imagine what would happen if each person in a factory had a different idea of what quality was. There would be no consistency from product to product. Or to use a sports analogy, imagine if each official on the football field had a different opinion of what “pass interference” meant. There would be no consistency in calling penalties. If everyone defines safety differently, how can your transportation company pull together to operate in the safest way possible?
‘POINT #1: Many business leaders have concluded that their accident frequency is acceptable. They believe that additional efforts to reduce it would be costly and yield marginal improvements. They are wrong.
You have a tremendous opportunity to achieve better safety results by simply changing this mindset.
It Takes a Change of Mindset
So how should you define safety? Our definition of safety is “freedom from risk.” It’s that simple. In other words, if you or any of your transportation company’s employees work in a situation that’s “risky” – posing some risk or danger to them or others – then, practically speaking, that workplace isn’t safe.
Naturally, you could say that every job inherently involves some risk. And for fleet and warehouse people, many aspects of their jobs are risky or somewhat dangerous. But undertaking efforts to reduce the risk…that’s working in the right direction.
Freedom from risk… Misunderstanding the definition of safety is only a symptom of a larger problem.
Along with defining safety, measuring safety is equally important. Most companies measure their safety results in two ways: the number of accidents and injuries and their overall cost of loss. This is like counting the missing horses after the barn door was left open.
The biggest leap occurs when one truly understands that virtually all accidents are caused by human behavior.1 They aren’t the result of fate or chance. That’s when it dawns on you that strategically, “we can do something to reduce accidents and their wasteful costs.” A behavior-based approach is both proactive and far more effective. You can minimize risk by eliminating unsafe behaviors, thereby reducing accidents and injuries.
The challenge is in knowing what to do and how to do it.
POINT #2: Accidents are caused; they are not “accidental”. Reducing accidents takes 1) a change of mindset and 2) a change in strategy.
The Strategy
There are three fundamental components of a safety-focused organization:
1. a culture that promotes a safety mindset,
2. systems to modify behavior so that people take responsibility for behaving safely and
3. support systems to encourage and reinforce those desired behaviors.
To achieve a safety-focused organization, there are twelve specific sets of activities that need to be implemented. They are:
Safety Culture
1. Safety Measures
2. Safety Communications
3. Safety Leadership
Safety Behavior Safety Behavior Modification Systems
1. Employee Recruitment & Selection
2. New Employee Orientation
3. Safety Education
Safety Training Safety Support Systems
1. Behavior-Based Reinforcement Systems
2. Performance Management Systems
3. Disciplinary Action Process
4. Corrective (Developmental) Action Process
Most companies’ safety efforts already include some of those activities; however achieving world-class safety requires a balanced, integrated and consistent strategy. The way to reduce accident costs is to implement a comprehensive safety strategy throughout the organization. Such a strategy includes shoring up existing efforts and introducing new ones.
Where does your transportation company rank as a safety-focused organization? Each of the twelve topics listed above can be utilized as a rating scale to assess your organization’s efforts toward achieving world-class safety. An organizational safety analysis conducted by unbiased, external experts can provide you with a wealth of information regarding your strengths, your weaknesses and your opportunities for improvement.
Jeff Cassell
Senior Vice President
Avatar Management Services, Inc
Macedonia, OH
jcassell@avatarms.com
References:
1 Large Truck Crash Causation Study (LTCCS) Analysis Series: Using LTCCS Data for Statistical Analyses of Crash Risk—FMCSA,2006
When did you last review and revise your company’s driver/vehicle safety policy? What is it’s “expiration date”?
Creating an effective, enforceable safety policy to govern how drivers drive, how vehicles get maintained, what to do in the case of a crash and so on is vitally important for a host of reasons:
1. Education: you need to communicate your expectations as a management team so that the drivers know what to do and how to do it.
2. Compliance: your standard provides a benchmark for enforcement of minimum acceptable performance.
3. Anticipates contingencies: well-crafted and communicated policies enable managers to deal with the vast majority of situations that may arise during a day, week or month without having to seek guidance from above while providing an escalation path for true exceptions.
One thing that the best policy can’t become is “timeless” — the world changes around us continually and as new technologies are introduced and case law is established our policies need to be reviewed to determine whether these changes warrant a revision to the policy.
Setting an artificial “expiration date” on driver/fleet safety policies would be one way to assure that the review is scheduled, budgeted and completed on a periodic basis. Assuming that policies will be reviewed and revised “on the fly” as changes occur may be fruitless as the demands of the moment may rob even the most dedicated manager of the time needed to complete the review/revisions in a timely fashion. By scheduling the review in advance, the manager can take a deliberate approach to the review.
Self-Audit Against an Industry Standard
One way to assure that any policy review is comprehensive would be to conduct a self-audit of the existing policy against a published industry standard or benchmark. The ANSI Z15.1 “sets forth practices for the safe operation of motor vehicles owned or operated by organizations” and was most recently revised in 2012. The standard covers seven key areas including “Definitions, Management, Leadership and administration, Operational environment, Driver considerations, Vehicle considerations, Incident reporting and analysis.“
While the standard may not cover all details of a specialty operation with unique exposures to loss, it does provide a baseline for comparison. For the vast majority of fleets, it will cover those critical areas that are found in most driver/fleet safety policies.
Fleets who discover gaps in their current policy can document why the gap exists and whether the gap should be filled or ignored (i.e. the fleet doesn’t engage in that type of operation or the scenario will not present itself in the context of the fleet’s current or anticipated operations, etc.)
Paul Farrell
CEO
SafetyFirst Systems
Parsippany, NJ
paulf@safetyfirst.com
