Sharing the Road with Trucks

So originally we thought about putting this program together.

Some research that was conducted at the Institute looking at safety critical events or crashes and close calls with large trucks.

What we found in that research was that about 78% of those crashes and close calls are actually the fault of the passenger vehicle driver.

And, you know, you probably hear all the time, people always want to quickly blame the truck driver.

But in reality, that's not the case.

That's not saying truck drivers are perfect because we still see about 20% of the time it is the truck driver's fault.

But in large part, it is the passenger vehicle driver that's at fault in those incidents.

So we got to thinking, how can we target the majority? to help bring that number down.

And we did an evaluation of driver education across all 50 states.

And what we found at the time, only about half the states actually require including anything about sharing the road with trucks in their driver ed curriculum.

So it was kind of an eye opener that only half the states required that.

And when we surveyed teachers across all these states, even when they did include sharing the road with trucks, the consensus among the educators was there was a big lack of information and materials to help teach that topic.

So typically they would say, oh, that's just a page or two on a textbook.

You know, maybe we have a DVD available or some posters on the classroom wall.

So that got us really got our brains going and we were like, okay, we know there's some different sharing the road programs out there.

How can we make a really comprehensive program to reach these 10th graders typically in driver education and to promote some good safe driving habits when they're first getting out on the roadways and hopefully carry that through life.

So we actually put together a program that can leverage our research in the naturalistic videos that we capture from that research.

Because while we're evaluating the truck driver or technologies in the truck, those videos quite often capture the passenger vehicles doing things they shouldn't around these trucks.

So do you have cameras on one of your trucks? Is that what?

No.

So our naturalistic research is where we put a whole bunch of cameras.

You know, we might have five or six cameras looking at the driver, down the sides of the truck, the front of the truck, out the back of the trailer.

And those are more for research purposes.

And you may have seen those videos on our website, or if you've seen one of our presentations, the cameras you're referring to on our truck are a new safety technology that's emerging in heavy vehicles that allows the truck driver to be able to see the displays inside the cab that show a wider field of view than what the actual mirrors show.

But, you know, back to the program we developed, you know, we have a classroom presentation where we teach five key strategies to the students to help them safely share the road with trucks.