Safety for the Long Haul – The website of Dr. Ronald R. Knipling

Welcome

Safety for the Long Haul, Inc. was a consultancy led by Dr. Ron Knipling, a scientist with 40 years of achievement in traffic safety. The company began as a sole proprietorship in 2006 and was incorporated in 2012. It performed more than 60 research, consulting, expert witness, and training-related contracts, many in topics related to large truck and other fleet safety. Dr. Knipling also devoted approximately 30% of his professional time to pro bono work focusing on research validity, integrity, new needs, and to public education.

Notice

Dr. Ron Knipling Passed Away on July 5, 2023

Ronald Roy Knipling of Bethesda, MD passed away on July 5, 2023 from complications of Glucagonoma, a rare neuroendocrine cancer. He was 76 years old. Born in Arlington, VA on February 20, 1947, Ron was the youngest of five siblings. His parents were Edward F. Knipling, a renowned entomologist, and Phoebe H. Knipling, the founder […]

July 10, 2023/by jknipling

Latest Blog Posts

Guest essays are welcome! Please click here for blog authoring guidelines.

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ONE REAR-END CRASH COULD DESTROY YOUR MOTOR TRANSPORT OR SERVICE BUSINESS

March 28, 2022/by Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

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A UNIVERSE OF CRASH & LIABILITY
RISK FACTORS FACE WORK FLEETS

January 30, 2022/by Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

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WORKER FATIGUE AND VEHICLE CRASHES IN THE OIL/GAS INDUSTRY

December 21, 2021/by Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

Safety for the Long Haul; Large Truck Crash Risk, Causation & Prevention is the first and only comprehensive resource book on large truck safety. Written by Dr. Knipling with contributions from other experts, the book’s 619 pages encompass more than 100 specific topics relating to large truck crash risk, causation, counter-measures, safety management, and safety policy. It is written in a direct, informative and readable style, but with technical rigor and accuracy. Its target audience is motor carrier and transportation safety professionals, other fleet managers and executives, and government and industry officials and researchers.

In 2010 Dr. Knipling received the Order of Merit, one of the highest recognitions given by the International Road Transport Union (IRU), an international organization representing highway users.

Book Features

Multifaceted and eclectic
Thirteen chapters cover more than 100 large truck safety topics, ranging from driver psychology to vehicle dynamics.
Incisive but non-technical
The book is written at the level of a college survey course, with emphasis on brevity, accuracy, and hitting the highlights.
Topical organization
Can be read in its entirety or used selectively like an encyclopedia.
Visual Presentations
The book contains more than 175 illustrations and another 150 tables and textboxes.

Reference Citations
Approximately 400 citations, many with web addresses.
Expert commentaries
To complement and enhance the main text, there are 18 guest commentaries from top truck safety experts.
Glossary, subject index, and truck safety website list

Reviews

“Every truck safety professional in the country should read this book. And every trucking company owner or chief executive, upon whom the ultimate responsibility for safety lies, should be familiar with it. And so should the next chief of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. . . What Ron Knipling . . . has attempted here is to put forth in one document, for the first time, the current best understanding of the theory and practice of truck safety . . . Knipling’s style is straightforward and efficient, and he has a passion for the subject that carries him through.”

Oliver B. PattonWashington Editor, Heavy Duty Trucking Magazine

“The best safety resource on the market…nothing else even comes close.”

Robert PetrancostaVice President of Safety, Con-way Freight

“An impressive road safety work, which helps address the main causes of accidents involving heavy commercial vehicles . . .”

Janusz LacnyPresident, International Road Transport Union (IRU)

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What’s Your Safety Personality?

Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

President, Safety for the Long Haul Inc.

Do you have a safety personality behind the wheel? Yes! Everyone has a safety personality. That’s because everyone has a personality, and several universal personality dimensions affect safety behavior. Driver personality is the strongest of various personal factors affecting safety outcomes, in my opinion. Others include driver age, gender, sensory-motor performance (e.g., reaction time), medical conditions, and mental abilities. All of these can affect driver crash risk, sometimes strongly. Yet it is my conclusion that driver personality exerts the greatest enduring affects.

What is personality? You might think of it as just behavior patterns in social situations. We all know both extraverts and introverts, for example. Yet it is more than that. Personality is your long-term consistencies of behavior, compared to others. This consistency is seen across decades of time and across a variety of situations. Think about yourself and 3-4 other people whom you have known for a long time, and across different situations. Who is the calmest person you know well? The most aggressive? The most friendly?

Maybe you are thinking that yes, people have individual differences in their behavior patterns, but that crash involvement is more a function of the environment and of just plain luck. Those elements are strong also. Traffic density is the biggest environmental factor affecting your safety on the roads each day. And traffic crashes, especially serious ones, are rare events relative to all the hours and miles of driving. Luck plays a role. Even the worst drivers have to be unlucky to find themselves involved in a crash on any given day.

The vagaries of life notwithstanding, individual personality effects become evident over time. Studies of groups of drivers, such as those in a truck or other motor vehicle fleet, show repeatedly that there are wide variations in drivers’ rates of risky behaviors. The same individuals tend to exhibit the highest risks over time.

One way to show this is to instrument fleet vehicles with sensors recording speeds, accelerations, decelerations (e.g., hard braking events), swerves, and close proximities to other vehicles. Many large studies have captured and recorded these events, along with video footage of drivers’ actions and surrounding traffic. Driver subjects are fully informed of the instrumentation and are compensated for agreeing to drive “in a fishbowl.” Observations over their first weeks show clearly that drivers habituate quickly to the sensors and behave as usual, whether good or bad. A few actual crashes are captured, but most of the events are “near-misses” or other aberrant incidents. Capturing a lot of events means more reliable statistics.

A commercial fleet study rank-ordered 95 truck drivers by their rate of involvement in these kind of at-fault events (described in Knipling, 2009). If involvements were just a matter of chance, you’d expect all the drivers to average out about the same. Yet the worst drivers, with just 19% of total mileage exposure, accounted for 53% of all the at-fault events. The remaining drivers with 81% of exposure were involved in just 47% of the at-fault close calls. Findings like this are seen reliably in instrumented fleet studies. My conclusion is that, in almost any group of drivers, 15-20% of drivers account for 50% or more of total driver error and, therefore, liability risk. By the way, the single very worst driver of the 95 did 0.9% of the total driving but had 6.3% of all at-fault events. He was seven times riskier than the average subject in the study.

There’s a bright side to this coin. The good drivers had 81% of the exposure but less than half (47%) of the total risk. Event counts even showed that 18 of the 95 drivers never made a detectable mistake. Fleet managers should pick out their bad apples but also recognize and appreciate all their good ones.

What if someone came back a year later and retested the same 95 drivers? Would the good and bad ones still be the same? The study did not do that, but evidence suggests that risk rankings wouldn’t change much. I conducted a survey (Knipling et al., 2004) of 178 motor carrier safety directors and 67 other experts (i.e., researchers, consultants, administrators) which addressed the question of risk consistency over time. When asked about the year-to-year consistency of driver risk, 67% of the safety directors said that relative driver risk stays about the same. Only 10% believed that relative risk can change dramatically. Among the other experts, 65% said that risk stays about the same. None of the 67 believed that individual risk can change dramatically.

So where do personality traits fit in this puzzle? Personality traits are measured along dimensions, not classified in distinct categories like blood type. Traits are scored by survey responses, answers to interview questions, and by behavioral observations. Personality research is thus fuzzy compared to other safety science. It is still compelling, though.

One personality trait with a strong relation to safety is sensation-seeking. People scoring high on this measure tend to seek excitement, take risks, and get bored easily. Sound like anyone you know? Sensation-seeking usually peaks in late adolescence, but individual differences among people remain for decades. Would you rather go to a party or read a book? People who seek “action” at a party tend also to seek “action” while driving.

Impulsivity is another personal red flag. It’s the inability to control impulses, which of course leads to hasty actions and errors. Impulsivity is strongly related to driving mistakes and misbehaviors. Driving presents an instantaneous personality test every time you approach a green-to-amber traffic signal change. With exceptions, we can infer impulsivity and risk-taking tendencies when drivers run the red.

Aggressiveness and anger-proneness are overlapping personality traits. Aggressive people are hard-charging, competitive, and impatient. People who are easily provoked can become wrathful behind the wheel. We’ve all had that road rage gut reaction, but some much more than others. My survey of 178 fleet safety directors asked them to rate the relative risk associated with 16 personal factors. “Aggressive/angry” was the #1 culprit, followed closely by “impatient/ impulsive.” The traits judged least risky of those offered included “older driver” and “introverted/unsociable.”

Decades of personality research has developed and elaborated the “Big Five” model of personality (Little, 2017). The five dimensions don’t encompass everything about a person, but they tell you a lot. The mnemonic “OCEAN” helps one to remember the five dimensions. Research finds that two of the five dimensions correlate most highly with safe and unsafe tendencies. As you read the list, try to pick out the two strongest safety indicators. The “Big Five” personality dimensions are:

Open to experience (vs. Closed)
Conscientious (vs. Casual)
Extraverted (vs. Introverted)
Agreeable (vs. Disagreeable)
Neurotic (vs. Stable).

What are your choices for the two that correlate most closely with behavioral safety? If you were hiring fleet drivers (or employees for any job with risks), you should seek out these two traits. A hint is that the same two personality traits correlate most highly with worker retention (Zimmerman, 2008; Knipling et al., 2011). Driver retention is highly prized in commercial fleets because of the driver shortage.

The American Transportation Research Institute, or ATRI (Boris & Luciana, 2017), reviewed personality traits and other personal risk factors in relation to truck driving safety. Their focus was on young truck drivers (18-25) but their results apply generally. They prioritized two of the “Big Five” as desired truck driver traits. Those two were Conscientiousness and Agreeableness.

The Conscientious personality embraces rule-following and traditional values. At the other end of this dimension, the casual personality interprets rules loosely and might scorn conventional thinking. Casual people aren’t necessarily bad. Little (2017) cites a study finding that the best jazz musicians scored low on conscientiousness. They could improvise because they weren’t shackled by rules. In driving, however, ATRI reported that low conscientiousness was associated with carelessness. You might have trouble getting safely across town if you improvise while driving.

Agreeableness is less obvious as a safety correlate. ATRI’s study focused on drivers who would be hired to drive for a fleet and therefore follow its rules; i.e., be a reliable team member. Agreeable personalities are motivated to get along smoothly with others and not “make waves.” For them, rule-following is the way to sustain positive relationships. The “go along to get along.” At the other extreme, disagreeable people aren’t motivated to get along and may be argumentative about rules and expectations.

Most companies don’t use formal personality tests in their driver screening and hiring, but more should. If you interview job candidates, just being aware of these personality dimensions might help you make better choices. And remember that the whole concept of personality rests on the long-term consistency of behavior. Past behavior predicts future behavior. Past driving behavior is most relevant, but look for non-driving red flags as well. A sad truth is that non-driving criminality is associated with elevated crash risks, twofold or more according to one leading expert (Evans, 2004).

As one who has studied the safety management of fleets, I advocate using every trick in the book to field safe vehicles, drivers, and operations. Do everything you can, across the board. Yet some management areas are more important than others. In a different survey, my colleagues and I (Knipling et al., 2011) asked fleet safety directors to choose the single most important area of fleet safety management from five choices. The answer “All of the above” was not permitted. The five management choices were:

Driver Orientation & Training
Driver Selection and Hiring
Company Communications
Driver Monitoring & Evaluation
Rewards & Discipline.

Notice that Choices 1, 3, and 5 above are all related to changing drivers to make them better. In contrast, Choices 2 and 4 are about assessing drivers as they actually are. How did safety directors allocate their 1^st place votes? Choices 2 and 4 together received 60% of the votes, about 30% each. The combined total of Choices 1, 3, and 5 was 40%, about 13% each. Stated simply, the safety directors placed higher value on accurately assessing drivers’ safety than on trying to change it. To say that one’s personality is “fixed” is too strong a statement. Enduring yes, but not immutable. Personality scientist Brian Little (2017) suggests that our personality roots arise deeply from our genetics and social histories, but that self-aware individuals can transcend their engrained tendencies. An introverted person can learn to function well socially and even become an influential leader, if that’s a necessity of the situation or a strong aspiration. Similarly, some drivers can transcend their past mistakes and commit to safe behaviors going forward. Personality is from your core, but it doesn’t have to be your destiny.

Cited References

ATRI. Research identifies multiple characteristics that may identify safe younger drivers. Research summary available at truckingresearch.org. Undated, downloaded 2021.

ATRI (Boris, C. & Luciana, M.M.). Developing a Younger Driver Assessment Tool Technical Memorandum #1. 2017. Available at truckingresearch.org.

Evans, L. Traffic Safety. Science Serving Society, Bloomfield Hills, MI. ISBN 0-9754871-0-8, 2004.

Knipling, R.R. Safety for the Long Haul; Large Truck Crash Risk, Causation, & Prevention. American Trucking Associations. ISBN 978-0-692-00073-1, 2009. Information available at www.safetyforthelonghaul.com.

Knipling, R.R., Boyle, L.N., Hickman, J.S., York, J.S., Daecher, C., Olsen, E. C. B., and Prailey, T.D. Synthesis Report #4: Individual Differences and the High- Risk Commercial Driver. TRB Commercial Truck & Bus Synthesis Program. ISSN 1544-6808, ISBN 0-309-08810-0, 2004a.

Knipling, R.R., Burks, S.V., Starner, K. M., Thorpe, C.P., Barnes, M. J. & Bergoffen, G. Driver Selection Tests & Measurements. CTBSSP Synthesis 21, TRB, ISBN 978-0-309-22339-9, http://www.trb.org/Publications/PubsCTBSSPSynthesisReports.aspx, 2011.

Little, Brian R. Who Are You, Really; The Surprising Puzzle of Personality. TED Books/Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-5011-1996-5, 2017.

Zimmerman, R.D. Understanding the impact of personality traits on individuals’ turnover decisions: a meta-analytic path model. Personnel Psychology, 61, 2008, Pp. 309-348.

Next month’s blog:

“Which of Five Factors Affects Driver Fatigue the Least?”

Guest essays invited: This website invites submission of guest essays/blogs for publication in coming months. Contact Dr. Ron Knipling at rknipling@verizon.net for information on editorial guidelines and evaluation criteria.

April 19, 2021/by Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

Notice

Dr. Ron Knipling Passed Away on July 5, 2023

Ron’s wife Leslie was the love of his life. They met at the University of Maryland and eloped on August 9, 1974, the same day that Richard Nixon resigned and left the White House. In nearly 50 years together they were mutually supportive and shared attitudes about politics, relationships, and philosophy of life. Travel was among their shared passions. Ron and Leslie adopted daughter Leah in 1982 and son Jesse one year later. Ron loved leading the kids on adventures such as hiking, canoeing, and exploring parks and playgrounds. As a disciplinarian he was the “good cop,” maybe too good! More recently Ron led grandsons Trenten and Kai to many of the same places, and to other new discoveries. He also volunteered in schools, tutoring math and teaching kids how to build birdhouses.

Ron loved the outdoors. Whitewater canoeing was his favorite sport, and he became an expert on regional streams. Members of Blue Ridge Voyageurs were among his closest friends. He also loved hiking and blazing trails. In the 1990s he had explored Strickler Knob, a spectacular but isolated promontory in the Massanutten mountains. Getting to Strickler Knob had been a wicked bushwhack, but Ron worked over many months to mark and clear a trail. It is now among the most popular hiking destinations in the
region.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

After receiving a Ph.D. in Physiological Psychology from the University of Maryland in 1975, Ron’s career took unexpected turns. He transitioned to applied psychology, training development, and finally to traffic safety research with a focus on large truck safety. Employers included the U.S. Department of Transportation, Virginia Tech, and his own consulting company. He was a self-driven and prolific writer. His more than 300 safety-related publications and presentations addressed topics such as driver risk, crash causation, and driver drowsiness. Ron wrote a 2009 textbook entitled Safety for the Long Haul; Large Truck Crash Risk, Causation, & Prevention. In recognition, he was awarded the International Road Transport Union (IRU) Order of Merit. He also became a crusader for validity in safety research, criticizing methods that were high-tech but lacked scientific grounding.

Ron is survived by his wife Leslie Knipling (nee Granick), son Jesse Knipling, daughter Leah Ruffner, son-in-law Evan Ruffner, and grandsons Trenten and Kai Ruffner. His surviving siblings include Edwina K. Lake, Anita K. Scott, Edward B. Knipling, and Gary D. Knipling. Survivors also include many beloved in-laws, nieces, nephews, and friends.

Glucagonoma is a rare cancer, newly afflicting fewer than 50 Americans each year. Symptoms from the disease, then undiagnosed, nearly killed Ron in 2004. Yet after diagnosis and surgery he survived, indeed thrived, for nearly 20 more years with a low-grade, treatable metastatic cancer. He attributed these years of active, quality life to innovative treatments, healthful behaviors, positive spirit, and family support.

Like many others, Ron became increasingly concerned in recent years about our earth’s welfare, and in particular about climate change. His family requests that, in lieu of flowers, contributions of money and time be made to organizations seeking to sustain natural life on our planet. A Celebration of Life for Ron will be held in September.

July 10, 2023/by jknipling

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ONE REAR-END CRASH COULD DESTROY YOUR MOTOR TRANSPORT OR SERVICE BUSINESS

by Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

President, Safety for the Long Haul Inc.
rrknipling@gmail.com

March, 2022

If you own or operate any kind of work vehicle fleet, whether a truck transport fleet or a non-transport service fleet, you should be aware that liability from rear-end road crashes is among the biggest threats you face. Road crashes are a looming threat to truck transport companies, including delivery operations. They also threaten the economic welfare of light vehicle service (e.g., taxi, repair, installation) fleets in metropolitan areas or other regions.

Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among U.S. workers (NIOSH, 2003, 2015) . Our target in this discussion is rear-end (RE) crash impacts where the transport/work vehicle is the striking vehicle. The U.S. DOT Large Truck Crash Causation Study (LTCCS) found that about 10% of all serious injury or fatal truck crash involvements were of the RE-striking type (Knipling, 2009). These crashes may injure truck drivers but they cause much more damage to struck light vehicles and more human harm to their occupants.

Rear-End Crash Harm

For large trucks, in particular tractor-semitrailers, the “Big Three” at-fault crash types are single-vehicle crashes, lane change/merge strikes, and RE strikes (Knipling, 2009). Each type is worst in its own way. Single-vehicle truck crashes kill the most commercial drivers, due in part to the physical force of rollovers and/or to safety belt non-use. Lane change/merge scenarios are where big rigs as the encroaching vehicle are most involved compared to other vehicle types. That’s largely due to limited driver visibility around trucks, especially on the right side.

Yet it is RE-striking crashes that cause the most overall human and material harm, and create the most tort liability for companies. I estimate that the expected vehicle lifetime risk of one tractor-semitrailer is about $22,000 for rear-end strikes alone. This estimate is based on a 1990s analysis (Wang, Knipling, and Blincoe, 1999) extrapolated to today’s dollars. The number encompasses all economic loss from crashes (e.g., damage, medical, lost income) as well as monetized values of human suffering, such as reduced quality of life. Monetized human suffering is also a major element of large crash liability settlements and verdicts. If your large fleet buys 100 truck tractors this year, you can expect roughly 100 × $22,000 = $2.2M in comprehensive harm from rear-end striking impacts involving your 100 vehicles in their operational lifetimes. Lifetime loss numbers are lower for light trucks/vans, but still considerable. My statistics suggest about $6,900 per vehicle, or $690,000 for a fleet of 100 light trucks/vans. While most work vehicles are never involved in a serious RE strike, those that are involved rocket average losses up to these sky-high levels. You must make efforts to prevent these crashes.

There are two obvious vehicle roles in RE crashes: the striking vehicle and the struck vehicle. With some exceptions, drivers in RE-striking impacts are considered at-fault and held liable, while struck vehicle occupants are seen as innocent victims. In litigation, struck vehicle occupants are plaintiffs while striking vehicle drivers and their companies are defendants. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) has published two recent studies on truck crash litigation (Murray et al., 2020; Evans & Leslie, 2021). In Murray’s study of million dollar-plus cases, 89% of 66 RE crashes ended with findings for the plaintiff. In contrast, when the truck was changing lanes, passing, or merging, only 44% of cases resulted in plaintiff findings.

Murray’s study was limited to million dollar-plus cases, whereas the Evans study looked at those less than a million. In Murray, RE crash verdict sizes (59 plaintiff, 7 defendant) averaged $5.46M. In Evans, RE crash payments averaged $428K, with settlements ($511K) costing more than jury verdicts ($359K). Payments like this can bankrupt companies, either directly or eventually due to increased insurance rates.

Public safety messages tell us that children in vehicles are almost always safer in the back seat. Yet the opposite is true when children are in the back seat of a rear-struck vehicle. Per Murray, when children are injured in major crashes, mean verdict size rises 18-fold. It’s the biggest single factor affecting award sizes.

One of my expert witness cases involved an asleep big rig driver striking a Kia stopped in a nighttime traffic backup on an Interstate. The impact speed was 65mph. The Kia’s three occupants were a father, mother, and seven year-old boy in the back seat. The “extremely violent impact” crushed the Kia and exploded it into flames. All three family members died instantly. In the cataclysm a third vehicle was also struck and engulfed in fire.

Causation

Tailgating is the primary cause of RE crashes. True or false?

The statement is false. The most frequent proximal cause of RE crashes is driver inattention of various types. This is especially true of RE crashes where the lead vehicle is stopped prior to the impact. Such RE Lead-Vehicle Stopped (RE-LVS) crashes typically occur when the lead vehicle is stopped at an intersection or on the road waiting to turn left. The schematic shows a typical truck-strikes-car scenario. Instrumented vehicle studies (e.g., Lee et al., 2007) show that striking drivers usually have plenty of time (2+ seconds) to recognize the stopped vehicle and evade an impact. Yet often they are distracted due to cell phone use, reaching for something inside the vehicle, or a distraction seen outside the vehicle. Sometimes striking drivers are asleep, as in the horrific crash described above. For large trucks, degraded brakes may play a role.

There’s a second, less frequent, category of RE strikes: those where the lead vehicle is moving at a slower speed or decelerating. These are called RE Lead-Vehicle Moving (RE-LVM) impacts. For this type, tailgating (following too closely) plays a relatively larger role, though direct driver observations (Lee et al., 2007, Carney et al., 2015) show inattention to still dominate. Excessive speed (over the speed limit or excessive for conditions) also contributes to many RE-LVM impacts (Knipling, 2009).

In the LTCCS, the striking truck was at-fault in 99% of RE-LVS impacts but only 84% of RE-LVM impacts (Knipling and Bocanegra, 2008). Why the different percentages? A common misbehavior of light vehicle drivers on highways is to cut in front of large trucks. A resulting RE-LVM crash might then be rightly blamed on the driver who cut in. In a few cases, cutting-in drivers have even been charged with attempted criminal fraud. Investigations, perhaps using video footage from the truck, can sometimes show that they intentionally caused the crash to seek a large litigation payment (Murray et al., 2020). You could put that in the Stupid Criminal file, though sometimes they get away with it.

Carney et al., (2015) viewed videos of 229 vehicle-to-vehicle crashes involving work fleet (e.g., taxi, shuttle, delivery, service) drivers. All were moderate-to-serious crashes where the work driver was primarily at-fault. The work fleets had been instrumented with the Lytx DriveCam^® in-vehicle monitoring system. Such systems capture video and sensor evidence relating to crashes and other abrupt (e.g., hard braking) events. Researchers classified the crashes as either RE (101) or angle impacts (128). They also viewed 8 seconds of each pre-impact video to observe and classify driver errors leading to the crash. More than one error could be cited. Almost all (97%) of the RE strikes were preceded by work driver recognition failures; i.e., inattention to the road ahead. Additionally, following too closely was cited for 27%. That’s a driver decision error. In other words, the driver made a volitional decision to tailgate. Angle crash (e.g., crossing path) impacts were a little different than RE impacts. Recognition failures were still the biggest driver error category (70%), but volitional decision errors (e.g., failure to yield, violating sign/signal) were also seen in 50%.

Driver recognition failures are overall the biggest proximal cause of traffic crashes (Starnes, 2006, NHTSA, 2008, Knipling, 2009). They include various forms of driver inattention to road and traffic events. In Carney, 64% of RE-strike drivers were engaging in some extraneous activity such as using their cell phone or reaching for an object in the vehicle. The inattention total rose to 97% when researchers included eyes-off-road and apparent cognitive capture (driver “lost in thought”). Compared to angle impacts, RE-striking drivers had their eyes off the road four times as long in the pre-impact seconds. They were also 3.5 times more likely to be using cell phones.

Prevention

The obvious purpose of fleet safety management is to prevent crashes. Serious crashes are tragic and traumatic events, even for those not severely injured. Yet a second purpose, perhaps cynical, is to look good in court should an at-fault crash occur. This may reduce punitive payments stacked on top of compensatory payments to victims (Murray et al., 2020). Here are four proven ways to reduce RE-striking and other motor fleet crash risks:

Systematic fleet safety management program. Core functions of fleet safety management include hiring and selecting safe drivers, orientation and training, ongoing safety communications (e.g., meetings), continuous driver monitoring & evaluation, recognitions and rewards for safe performance, discipline and/or remediation for unsafe actions, investigating accidents for lessons learned, and always striving for improvement. These and related management practices constitute safety culture.
Firm cell phone policy. At a minimum, reinforce state laws and federal regulations for commercial vehicles. Consider even stricter rules. For example, hands-free cell phone use may be legal for your drivers, but it can still be dangerous, especially in town or urban traffic. Driving simulator tests demonstrate five types of driver cognitive and performance deficits associated with hands-free cell phone conversations. They include deficits in visual scanning, predicting unfolding events, recognizing hazards, deciding how to respond, and executing that response (Strayer & Fisher, 2016).
In-vehicle monitoring. Safety-conscious fleets monitor and evaluate their drivers continuously and comprehensively (Toledo et al., 2008). Continuous onboard safety monitoring can record and assess driver speeds, hard-braking, lateral accelerations (indicative of speed on curves), lane keeping, idling times, and fuel economy (a good surrogate of safety). Earlier we presented research (Carney et al., 2015) based on work vehicles equipped with Lytx DriveCam® devices. These and similar devices capture abrupt driving events, both crashes and near-crashes. Near-crashes are a leading indicator of a driver’s crash risk. Safety directors can use the videos and data as a sit-down training tool with drivers. In more dire cases, it is a solid basis for driver discipline or termination. Safety directors also report that vehicle-mounted videos often exonerate their drivers by showing that the other driver was at-fault.
Forward Collision Warning (FCW) systems. Dramatic RE crash reductions are possible through the application of advanced onboard safety technologies such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW) systems. FCW systems use radar or other sensors to monitor the forward roadway and warn of rapid closing with a vehicle or object ahead. Most often they initiate warnings quickly enough to evoke a successful driver avoidance response. They prevent most RE-strikes and reduce the impact severity of those that do occur. Some systems even initiate immediate de-throttling and/or braking. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (2020) found that FCW systems reduce RE-striking injury crashes by 56%.

All of the safety interventions presented here have positive Returns-on-Investment (ROIs) for fleets. Fleet safety is not just morally correct – it’s profitable!

Cited References

Carney, C., McGehee, D., Harland, K., Weiss, M., and Raby, M. Using Naturalistic Driving Data to Assess Vehicle-to-Vehicle Crashes Involving Fleet

Drivers. Univ. of Iowa and AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. June 2015.

Evans, C. and Leslie, A. The Impact of Small Verdicts and Settlements on the Trucking Industry. American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), November 2021. Available at truckingresearch.org.

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Information sheet: Real-world benefits of crash avoidance technologies. Available at www.iihs.org. December 2020.

Knipling, R.R. Safety for the Long Haul; Large Truck Crash Risk, Causation, & Prevention. American Trucking Associations. ISBN 978-0-692-00073-1, 2009a. Available for purchase at www.atabusinesssolutions.com.

Knipling, R.R. & Bocanegra, J. Comparison of Combination-Unit Truck and Single-Unit Truck Statistics from the LTCCS. FMCSA & Volpe Center Project report. Contract No. DTRS57-04-D-30043. 2008.

Lee, Suzanne E., Llaneras, E., Klauer, S., & Sudweeks, J. Analyses of Rear-End Crashes and Near-Crashes in the 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study to Support Rear-Signaling Countermeasure Development. NHTSA Report No. DOT HS 810 846. October 2007.

Murray, D., Williams, N. and Speltz, E. Understanding the Impact of Nuclear Verdicts on the Trucking Industry. ATRI, June 2020. Available at truckingresearch.org.

NHTSA. National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Study: Report to Congress. DOT HS 811 059. U.S. DOT, 2008.

Pratt, S. National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH). Publication No. 2003-119: Work-Related Roadway Crashes – Challenges and Opportunities for Prevention; 4. Special Topic on Driver Fatigue, September, 2003. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2003-119/2003-119d.html.

NIOSH. Preventing Work-Related Motor Vehicle Crashes. 2015. Available At: Https://Www.Cdc.Gov/Niosh/Docs/2015-111/Default.Html.

Starnes, M. LTCCS: An Initial Overview. NHTSA National Center for Statistics & Analysis, DOTR HS 810 646, August 2006.

Strayer, D. L. and Fisher, D. L., SPIDER: A Framework for Understanding Driver Distraction. Vol. 58, No. 1, February 2016, pp. 5–12.

Wang, J.S., Knipling, R.R., and Blincoe, L.J. The dimensions of motor vehicle crash risk. Journal of Transportation and Statistics. Volume 2, No. 1, Pp. 19-43, ISSN 1094-8848, May, 1999.

Next month’s planned essay is:

“The Biggest Scientific Error in Road Safety Research History”
by Ron Knipling

Guest essays invited: This website invites submission of guest essays/blogs for publication in coming months. Contact Dr. Ron Knipling at rrknipling@gmail.com for information on editorial guidelines and evaluation criteria.

March 28, 2022/by Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

Uncategorized

A UNIVERSE OF CRASH & LIABILITY
RISK FACTORS FACE WORK FLEETS

by Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

President, Safety for the Long Haul Inc.

January, 2021

If you are the owner or operator of a motor transport or other work vehicle fleet, you have probably gotten that phone call from one of your drivers. The driver calls in to report their involvement in an on-job traffic crash. The ensuring Q&A sequence is predictable. You’ll first ask about location and severity. Are you okay? What about the other vehicle and its occupants? Is the crash scene now secure? Should the company send someone to the scene?

For severe crashes, that may be the gist of the initial conversation. First things first. But the topic of causation will always follow. How did the crash happen? Who was at-fault? Any laws broken? Are we potentially liable? As a manager, you will ask yourself whether the crash was preventable (i.e., your driver could be blamed), what were their critical errors, and whether you should impose consequences. For many work vehicle crashes, this sequence constitutes most of the depth and breadth of managers’ investigations of their fleet crashes.

A ”Reptile” Theory of Crash Litigation

The process generates more anxiety and expense if your fleet driver is at-fault and there is significant human and/or material harm. Victims will become plaintiffs, and their attorneys will use discovery to seek to deconstruct the competence of your driver and your company’s safety management program and practices. Some defendant groups have called this the reptile approach to crash litigation. In their conceived scenario, the plaintiff attorney will present and seek to establish the importance of certain safety rules work fleets should follow. “A safety rule is a universal principle of how people should behave . . . A plaintiff attorney . . . will point out to jurors a general safety rule, get defense witnesses to agree with the rule, demonstrate to jurors how the defendant broke the safety rule, and, evoking emotion, suggest that breaking the rule put the entire community at risk . . . “ (Marinakis and Wilinski, 2016). The second phase of the plaintiff attack is to convince jurors that they are the only ones with the power to counter the community threat. It follows that jurors should exercise that power by finding for the plaintiff and awarding large monetary damages, both compensatory and punitive.

Per the theory, this plaintiff strategy is neurophysiologically grounded in the evolution of the human brain. Plaintiff fear-mongering in testimony awakens the reptilian complex of jurors’ brains, the earliest portion of our brains which we share with other animals, including reptiles. This brings forth primitive emotions and instincts, including anger and fear. When aroused, the inner brain takes command and can overpower logic and reason, thus leading to vengeance in the form of enormous jury awards (Marinakis and Wilinski, 2016). The schematic shows this simplistic concept.

Does modern neuroscience actually espouse the existence of a reptilian brain in the core of your human and mammalian brain? The idea was proposed and debated 50 years ago, but is dismissed by brain scientists today. Few if any experts in brain evolution take the idea seriously (Murray et al., 2020). Yes, the human brain has evolved and inner portions of it are similar to those of other vertebrates. But humans do not have reptilian structures in their brains.

Moreover, for those of us seeking ways to reduce traffic crashes and harm, the idea of reptilian brains inside human jurors’ brains is fishy. It’s a red herring – an argument intended to divert attention from the real problems and issues at hand. The central issue in most crash litigations is real risk factors existing in a fleet which may have created “accidents just waiting to happen.”

Crash Causation: Risk + Proximal Trigger

The crash genesis schematic below is from my 2009 book, Safety for the Long Haul. It presents a conceptual timeline of how risk factors and proximal causes result in a motor vehicle crash. Driver errors and other failures (vehicle, roadway) are the immediate or “proximal” causes of crashes. Driver errors account for ~90% of proximal crash causes (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2008). Researchers have delineated a detailed taxonomy of driver error types, but one simple distinction tells much of the story (Knipling, 2009). Most driver errors are either volitional misbehaviors (e.g., speeding, tailgating) or inadvertent mistakes (e.g., “looked but did not see”). As a fleet operator, you have to decide which category applies, and then act accordingly.

Timeline of risk factors and proximal cause(s) before a crash (Knipling, 2009).

Proximal causes trigger collisions, but before that there is risk. Crashes can happen to anybody under any circumstances, but usually they happen against a backdrop of elevated risk. Risk factors operate probabilistically. They can begin any time, ranging from years before a crash (e.g., driver history) to just seconds before (e.g., transient distraction). They set up a situation where proximal errors are more likely to occur and/or have greater consequences. Multiple risk factors exist at any time. They can have additive or even multiplicative effects on total risk. They include driver age (young), gender (male), driving history, non-driving transgressions, personality (aggressiveness, impulsivity, risk-taking tendencies), poorly maintained equipment, non-use of vehicle safety technologies, roadway type, and traffic density. In work fleets inadequate fleet safety management is the main correlate of increased crash risk. Inadequate fleet safety management often includes (Knipling et al., 2003; Knipling and Nelson, 2011):

Failure to establish and/or live by firm driving safety policies.
Inadequate driver screening.
Lack of safety training and other safety communications.
Failure to monitor and evaluate employee drivers. Evaluation includes in-vehicle monitoring; e.g., DriveCam®, StreetCam®, other dynamic sensors and recorders.
Failure to equip fleet vehicles with crash prevention technologies such as Forward Collision Warning.
Failure to plan trips mindful of traffic and other road risks.
Failure to intervene proactively and/or retroactively to address unsafe employee driving.
Failure to objectively monitor and measure overall fleet safety performance.
Failure to seek constant improvement.
For many non-transport service fleets, failure to recognize that their biggest safety risks are from traffic crashes, not from outside-the-vehicle accidents (Pratt/NIOSH, 2003; NIOSH, 2015).

Most of my 40+ years of traffic and fleet safety experience has been in conducting and overseeing safety research projects. Along the way I’ve strived to document and present safety research findings in a manner which speaks to fellow researchers but also to motor fleet safety directors and to drivers. My crash expert witness experience has spanned just the last decade. Based on this moderate legal experience base, I don’t believe that plaintiffs’ strategies are centered on vilifying fleets through fear-mongering. The primary content of my case opinions has been objective explorations of crash causation from a big picture perspective. This starts with the proximal conditions and failures triggering the crash, and then probes deeper and more broadly into the array of safety management risk factors within the fleet which have elevated crash probability. A fleet safety manager’s job is to implement practices to lower crash probabilities. These same practices will shield against high tort liability when at-fault crashes do occur.

Cited References

Knipling, R.R., Hickman, J.S., and Bergoffen, G. Synthesis 1: Effective Commercial Truck and Bus Fleet Management Techniques. TRB CTBSSP Project MC-02, ISSN 1544-6808, ISBN 0-309-08754-6. Washington D.C.: TRB, 2003.

Knipling, R.R. and Nelson, K.C. Safety Management in Small Motor Carriers. CTBSSP Synthesis 22, TRB, ISBN 978-0-309-22340-9, http://www.trb.org/Publications/PubsCTBSSPSynthesisReports.aspx, 2011.

Marinakis, C. and Wilinski, J. The Reptile Brain Strategy: Why Lawyers Use It and How to Counter It. Litigation Insights, March 3, 2016. Available at: https://www.litigationinsights.com/reptile-brain-strategy-lawyers-how-to-counter/

Murray, E.A., Wise, S.P., Baldwin, M.K.L, and Graham, K.S. The Evolutional Road to Human Memory, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-882805-1, 2020.

NIOSH. Preventing Work-Related Motor Vehicle Crashes. 2015. Available At: Https://Www.Cdc.Gov/Niosh/Docs/2015-111/Default.Html.

As a follow-up to this month’s topic, next month’s essay is:

“One Rear-End Crash Can Destroy Your Motor Transport or Service Business” by Ron Knipling

January 30, 2022/by Ronald R. Knipling, Ph.D.

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