Safe Driver Week 2017 Will Keep You On Your Toes
Ready to put your fleet’s safety and compliance program to the test? You’d better be. This week is Operation Safe Driver Week, and members of law enforcement across the country are on the lookout for traffic safety violations on the part of truckers and other commercial motor vehicle operators.
Developed the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Operation Safe Driver Week is an annual event meant to reduce risky highway driving behaviors and promote safety education and awareness. It’s not just a PR campaign: last year, reports Overdrive magazine, law enforcement issued roughly 21,000 warnings and citations to commercial trucks, buses, and passenger vehicles.
Police will be paying particular attention to the following violations:
- speeding
- texting and mobile phone use behind the wheel (and other forms of distracted driving)
- failure to wear a seatbelt
- following too closely
- improper lane changes
- disregard for traffic control devices
Operation Safe Driver Week should serve as a reminder that compliance encompasses more than paperwork. Trucking and transportation companies can use this opportunity to review their safety and compliance initiatives and determine whether their policies actually translate to safe operator behaviors. If that isn’t the case, there may be an issue with training, trucking compliance specialist Jane Jazrawy told American Trucker:
“There is a tendency in the industry to present the regulation exactly as it’s written. This is a terrible idea because often those regulations are extremely difficult to understand. They are written by lawyers, not by educators, and they’re written so that they can be enforced and defended, not as teaching materials. Your job as a trainer is to translate and organize those regulations into chunks of information that people can understand and apply to their daily lives.”
Sounds a lot like our onboarding, orientation, and safety monitoring platform. See how Compli’s solutions help fleets more effectively train—and retain—their operators.
For more information about federal transportation regulations—and more “fun” with acronyms—check out Compli’s resources for trucking compliance.
