The CEI Group 4850 East Street Road Suite 200 Trevose, PA 19053 (877) 234-0378 Fleet Driver Management™ www.ceinetwork.com White Paper THE ROLE OF DRIVER SAFETY TRAINING IN REDUCING FLEET ACCIDENT RATES Introduction It’s been estimated that fleet accidents cost American business more than $60 billion a year, and in the current economic climate, fleet and safety managers are under intense pressure to reduce those costs by cutting their accident rates. One of the most commonly sought solutions is driver training. But with an increasingly large number of onboard vehicle technological alternatives to preventing accidents, the question is whether training delivers the most cost- effective results. This paper tries to answer that question by taking a broad look at the scientific evidence on the true value of driver education and training. Because most of the research has focused on teen driver education, we take a brief look at that first, along with a look at the less-extensive research regarding the effectiveness of training on more experienced adult drivers. What we find are clues that begin to put the role of fleet driver training into proper perspective. Our conclusion is that driver training is an important and useful tool for reducing fleet accident rates, but that by itself, it is unlikely to achieve the reduction in accident rates that fleets are seeking. The reason for that is the growing consensus in the field of highway safety research that the cause of accidents isn’t a lack of driver knowledge about how to drive safely, but the way in which drivers choose to drive–in short, “driver behavior.” CEI’s experience shows that it is possible to achieve significant reductions in fleet accident rates through a comprehensive program that uses training as one of its principal components Training: a quick fix? A company that moved into new offices found that its maintenance people were having an unusual number of accidents changing light bulbs. Because these staff members were falling off ladders, the company decided to give them all additional training in how to use ladders. But after the training sessions, too many of the maintenance team members were still falling off their ladders. After looking into the problem more closely, management discovered the problem: in the new offices, the ceilings were higher and the ladders were too short. It was only after management bought taller ladders that the accident rate returned to normal.
Transcript
The CEI Group4850 East Street Road
Suite 200Trevose, PA 19053
(877) 234-0378
Fleet Driver Management™www.ceinetwork.com
White Paper
THE ROLE OF DRIVER SAFETY TRAINING IN REDUCING FLEET ACCIDENT RATES Introduction
It’s been estimated that fleet accidents cost American business more than $60 billion a year, and in the current economic climate, fleet and safety managers are under intense pressure to reduce those costs by cutting their accident rates. One of the most commonly sought solutions is driver training. But with an increasingly large number of onboard vehicle technological alternatives to preventing accidents, the question is whether training delivers the most cost-effective results.
This paper tries to answer that question by taking a broad look at the scientific evidence on the true value of driver education and training. Because most of the research has focused on teen driver education, we take a brief look at that first, along with a look at the less-extensive research regarding the effectiveness of training on more experienced adult drivers. What we find are clues that begin to put the role of fleet driver training into proper perspective.
Our conclusion is that driver training is an important and useful tool for reducing fleet accident rates, but that by itself, it is unlikely to achieve the reduction in accident rates that fleets are seeking. The reason for that is the growing consensus in the field of highway safety research that the cause of accidents isn’t a lack of driver knowledge about how to drive safely, but the way in which drivers choose to drive–in short, “driver behavior.” CEI’s experience shows that it is possible to achieve significant reductions in fleet accident rates through a comprehensive program that uses training as one of its principal components
Training: a quick fix?
A company that moved into new offices found that its maintenance people were having an unusual number of accidents changing light bulbs. Because these staff members were falling off ladders, the company decided to give them all additional training in how to use ladders.
But after the training sessions, too many of the maintenance team members were still falling off their ladders. After looking into the problem more closely, management discovered the problem: in the new offices, the ceilings were higher and the ladders were too short. It was only after management bought taller ladders that the accident rate returned to normal.
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A well-known safety consultant told this story in a break-out session at a national conference a few years ago. He offered it as an all-too-common example of business’s instinctive “Band-Aid” response to a rash of accidents. The assumption is that if an unacceptable number of accidents are happening, it’s because employees haven’t been properly trained in how to do their jobs safely. But, as the consultant pointed out, it’s not always a lack of training that is the root of the problem.
There’s no question at CEI that driver safety training has its benefits. We’ve heard from several drivers–including one of our own employees–that one of our lessons taught them something that enabled them to avoid an accident within only a few days after taking the class. We’ve also been told by an experienced fleet consultant that “even he” learned something new from one of our online-training modules.
But, in our opinion, a major portion of the benefit of driver safety training comes from something other than its content. Instead, it derives from the fact that in providing training, a company demonstrates it cares enough about driver safety to spend time and money to talk about it. And therein lies the key to reducing fleet accidents: creating a powerful “safety culture,” an atmosphere in which employees understand that safety is a top management priority, as important as profits and market share are, and is the expected way of doing business.
Does driver education prevent accidents?
It’s long been documented that teenage drivers have the highest accident rates. But the question of whether driver education is effective in reducing accidents among teenagers has been hotly debated for decades. While no one disputes the necessity of giving prospective new drivers lessons on how to operate a motor vehicle along with instruction in the rules of the road, what’s been questioned is whether more extensive classroom training than that needed to pass a written license exam makes any difference.
In a 2009 report, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) summarized the scientific findings about the effects of teenager driver education: “Despite widespread appeal of driver education, scientific evaluations indicate that it does not produce . . . drivers less likely to be in crashes than comparable drivers without formal training.” It went on to say:
Although it may be “common sense” to think that driver education is the way to learn how to drive, the notion that a traditional driver education course by itself can produce safer drivers is optimistic. Generally, the courses are taught over short periods, and most of that time must be spent teaching basic vehicle handling skills.
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The NHTSA report cited the results of a landmark 1986 study of more than 16,000 teen drivers in DeKalb County, Georgia. Extensive analysis of the data showed that teen drivers who took driver education courses had fewer crashes and motor vehicle violations than did the control group consisting of those who didn’t take courses, but only for the first six months after they had received their licenses. After that, it said there was no significant difference between the two groups. The study said the reason was that, over time, the safety messages delivered and received in the courses became “overwhelmed by attitudes, motivations, peer influences and cognitive decision making skills that shape driving styles and crash involvement.”
The NHTSA report echoed the findings of a 1999 study of the literature on teen driving education by a team of researchers at the Highway Safety Research Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “Despite the belief in the safety value of driver education, programs have not been proven effective,” the team wrote. Worse, the report said the programs might actually contribute to more teen accidents “because they lead to earlier licensure,” before teenagers have developed the advanced motor, hand-eye coordination, cognitive skills and the emotional maturity to reduce their accident risk.
Studies that have been conducted on the effect of advanced driver training on the crash rates of experienced adult drivers came to the same conclusions. In 2008, the Cochrane Collaboration, a London, UK-based international association of 28,000 health-care and safety professionals and researchers, issued a report on 23 US studies of advanced driver education courses and one in Sweden between 1962 and 1999. Its conclusion: “This systematic review provides no evidence that post-licence [sic] driver education is effective in preventing road traffic injuries or crashes.” It did find some evidence that the courses caused a slight reduction in the number of traffic violations but said the number was so small the reduction might have been the result of sampling bias in the underlying studies.
What causes motor vehicle crashes?
In view of the evidence on the limited effect of driver training on safety, there’s a growing consensus that a lack of safety knowledge is far less of a factor in the cause of motor vehicle accidents than are driver decisions. One factor in those decisions is the skill at avoiding accidents that only comes with driving experience, an observation borne out in the statistics that show that accident rates generally decrease with age (see the far right column in the chart below.)
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Source: U.S. Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1114.pdf
Another factor is a driver’s physical and cognitive capabilities. On the one hand, there are teenagers whose cognitive still haven’t fully developed. The flip side of that is that accident rates start to increase for drivers in their mid-70s , which can be attributed to a loss of physical capabilities, like eyesight, reflexes, strength, and endurance.
But a third factor is a driver’s personality, his or her psychological makeup that produces a more or less consistent pattern of behavior. At least one researcher says it’s the dominant factor in the risk for accidents. In a 2002 article in American Scientist, Dr. Leonard Evans, a world-renowned traffic safety expert wrote, “Driver behavior – what the driver chooses to do – is the factor that dominates traffic safety.” He went on to say:
Drivers use vehicles for purposes that go beyond transportation, including competition, sense of power and control…Speed and acceleration produce pleasurable sensations and excitement even when no specific destination lies ahead and there is no point in haste.
Crash risk relates to factors at the very core of human personality…Experience may contribute to increasing driver safety, but it seems clear that involvement in severe crashes [like] arrests for offenses unrelated to driving both reflect deep human characteristics.
This suggests that, given the same amount of training in, say, the dangers of speeding, one driver may change his or her behavior while another one won’t.
698 TransportationU.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012
Table 1114. Licensed Drivers and Number in Accidents by Age: 2009[211,000 represents 211,000,000]
Age group
Licensed drivers Drivers in accidents Accident rates per number of drivers
Number (1,000) Percent
Fatal All
Number PercentNumber (1,000) Percent Fatal 1 All 2
25 to 34 years old . . . . . . . . . 36,694 17.4 8,800 18.3 3,270 19.8 24 935 to 44 years old . . . . . . . . . 38,424 18.2 7,500 15.6 2,910 17.6 20 845 to 54 years old . . . . . . . . . 41,921 19.9 8,300 17.3 2,750 16.7 20 755 to 64 years old . . . . . . . . . 33,271 15.8 5,900 12.3 1,710 10.4 18 565 to 74 years old . . . . . . . . . 19,135 9.1 3,500 7.3 820 5.0 18 475 years old and over . . . . . . 13,764 6.5 3,800 7.9 540 3.3 28 4
1 Per 100,000 licensed drivers. 2 Per 100 licensed drivers. 3 Rates for drivers under age 16 are substantially overstated due to the high proportion of unlicensed drivers involved.
Source: National Safety Council, Itasca, IL, Injury Facts, annual (copyright). See also <http://www.nsc.org/>.
Table 1112. Crashes by Crash Severity: 1990 to 2009[6,471 represents 6,471,000. A crash is a police-reported event that produces injury and/or property damage, involves a vehicle in transport and occurs on a trafficway or while the vehicle is in motion after running off the trafficway]
– Represents zero. 1 Includes age and sex unknown, and other and unknown types of vehicles. 2 See footnotes 2 and 3,Table 1107.
Source: U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts, annual. See also <http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/CATS/index.aspx>.
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The difference is that each of the drivers has a different perception of risk or prefers to take more or less risk than does the other. All too often, the additional risks taken result in traffic tickets or, worse, an accident, which may cause the driver to change his or her behavior. On the flip side, the longer drivers get away with risky or careless behavior, the greater their complacency and confidence grows in believing that they are safer drivers because they are more skilled than the average driver.
How do you change driver behavior?
While we tend to think of personalities as something that cannot change, Evans writes that social pressure can influence changes in behavior, if not personality. In the following passage, he talks about campaigns in the United States that have increased the use of seat belts and brought about a decrease in drunk driving in Australia:
Social norms can be quite an important influence. Drivers tend to behave in ways they think their peers would approve of. Various influences, such as media messages on safe driving, may have contributed to an evolving social norm in which irresponsible driving is less acceptable, just as smoking has become increasingly unacceptable in the last several decades.
It’s important to add that Evans takes note that in Australia, drunk driving decreased because of the introduction of a new practice of continual random breath testing of as many as a third of all drivers every year. The significance for fleets is that increased observation of driver behavior, with the implicit threat of penalties, helped to effect the change.
Industrial psychologists long ago established a similar connection between observation of human behavior and change. In a landmark experiment in the late 1920s to the early 1930s, the founder of modern industrial psychology, Elton Mayo, made a remarkable discovery. He was hired by the Western Electric Company to come to its electrical relay manufacturing plant in Hawthorne, Illinois, to determine which kind of light bulbs would produce the greatest increase in the productivity of the company’s employees. He conducted an experiment in a separate room with different light bulbs and different groups of employees. What he found was that the productivity of every group of employees improved at about the same rate, regardless of which kind of light bulbs the groups worked under.
Mayo’s discovery has since been come to known and the “Hawthorne Effect.” Simply put, it means that when employees know that management wants
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an improvement in their behavior and carefully observes and measures that behavior in ways that are obvious to the employees, they voluntarily improve that behavior.
The finding aligns well with the idea that people respond to expectations of their behavior by their peers. Another word that social scientists use for the expected behavior is “social norms.” In the world of work, norms are the result of the interplay between the behavior fellow employees display and the behavior they exhibit in response to the standards their managers enforce through potential punishment–like firing, loss of bonuses–or rewards, like raises and promotions.
In factory or office environments, where employees are in daily contact with coworkers and managers, employee behavior is easier to control than in locations where individuals work alone, unwatched by managers for long periods of the day or more. Such is the environment of the fleet automobile.
The implications of Mayo’s and Evans’ findings for fleet managers are clear. The way to change driver behavior is to announce standards of driving behavior; observe, record, and measure that behavior in ways that are obvious to drivers; and to hold drivers accountable for their behavior through appropriate consequences, which can be punitive or rewarding.
In this framework, training can be a consequence of bad driving behavior: get a ticket or have an accident, and the driver must use otherwise productive work or personal time to complete a prescribed training program. But even in the absence if bad behavior, training can also be used to establish awareness that management expects safe driving and to continue to reinforce that awareness.
Looking at driver safety training from this point of view isn’t to deny that the content matters. It’s possible, as we have mentioned, for even experienced drivers to learn some new technique. It’s also useful to review methods that help prevent accidents in the context of real driving experiences that fleet drivers encounter every day. Periodic training can heighten their awareness of safe driving techniques and enable them to rehearse them so they’re more readily recalled when needed.
Putting it all together: creating a strong safety culture
We’ve been using the word “culture” here the way social scientists define it: the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group. In the realm of the modern working world, culture is both the standards of individual and group behavior that an organization defines and the way those standards are reflected in the actual behavior of its members.
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A strong safety culture, therefore, is one in which safety–the absence of accidents and the injuries they cause–is both an explicitly stated organizational goal and an accurate summary of the actual behavior and outcomes experienced by its members. Because achieving those results is a function of the organization’s entire plan of operation, including the tools and procedures the organization uses and the rewards and punishments it hands out, a strong safety culture must start from the top. Safety must be built into the complete operational plan of the organization, which means it’s the responsibility of senior management to initiate and support it. In turn, each level of management must do its part to reinforce the message and evaluate employee behavior in terms of the company’s safety standards.
CEI has worked with a number of fleets to help them create or strengthen their fleet safety culture and reduce their accident rates by significant margins. In the process, we’ve observed that the most effective cultures have the following characteristics in common. They:
• Set fleet driver safety policy standards and goals.
• Communicate the policy and goals, both visibly and regularly, always explaining what safety means to the company’s success and to its employees and their families.
• Annually require all fleet drivers to read the policy, pass a test on its contents, and sign a commitment to follow it.
• Market safety through an internal ongoing communication campaign that includes proactive training courses.
• Avoid hiring bad drivers by carefully checking their motor vehicle records during the evaluation process.
• Observe fleet driver behavior by gathering data in multiple ways, including motor vehicle reports, reported accidents, traffic camera violations, and driver reporting services.
• Keep up-to-date files of all driver data.
• Create a system that assigns all drivers a risk score based on the number and nature of safety policy infractions drivers have incurred.
• Make drivers aware of their current risk score, what events are behind it, how it’s computed, and ways that it can change, upward or downward.
• Establish consequences for when drivers pass through higher risk score thresholds. Include the completion of training assignments as one of the consequences.
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Fleet Driver Management™www.ceinetwork.com
The CEI Group4850 East Street Road
Suite 200Trevose, PA 19053
(877) 234-0378
• Take consistent action against drivers as soon as possible after they pass through defined risk thresholds, while granting special public recognition and/or rewards to drivers for extended periods of event-free records.
• Make driving safety performance a part of every fleet driver’s annual workplace performance reviews. Make group performance a criterion for manager reviews.
For any fleet safety program, this is a large agenda. Fortunately, most of these tasks can be automated using contemporary information technology. The result is information that can appear on the desktop, laptop, and tablet computers of everyone with a role in fleet operations and management.
Conclusion: safety training can’t do it alone
Driver safety training is a valuable and important component of any fleet safety program, but it’s not realistic to expect it to achieve long-term changes in driver behavior and a significant reduction in fleet accident rates. Experience proves that used in the context of a comprehensive program that creates and supports a safety culture–an environment where all players understand that serious regard for safety is the only acceptable attitude toward driving–training can help reduce fleet accident rates and their associated financial costs.
Driver training, both online and behind-the-wheel training, is a core component of CEI’s DriverCare fleet safety and risk management application, which has helped fleets reduce their accident rates by 30% or more. To learn more about how CEI can help your fleet strengthen its safety culture and prevent accidents, please call us, toll-free, at 1-877-234-0378.
