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The safety panel includes (from left) Abbott, Vance, Olszewski and Lasko. (John Sommers II for Transport Topics)

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SAN DIEGO — The trucking industry has made safety a pillar of its evolution and a crucial guide to its future, according to a panel of experts Oct. 25.

“We’re always looking to do better,” Rob Abbott, vice president of corporate strategy at Fleetworthy, said while hosting the discussion at American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition. “We’re always looking to improve on that rate, and what is the next best thing. So, the constant is not just that we’re trying to improve, the other constant is how. What is it that we’re trying to do that will move the needle even further?”

Abbott pointed out that trucking has a history of continual improvement in safety. Reaching back 50 years, he noted that the industry has reduced its fatal crash rate by more than 50% since 1975.

“When you look historically, there’s been a number of things we’ve done,” Abbott said. “Probably 30 years ago we first installed speed limiters — many would say in a measure to improve fuel economy. But they certainly had an impact on safety, because as we slowed vehicles down we gave drivers better braking distance, we gave them the ability to engage in evasive maneuvers. They were then able to prevent crashes, but also reduce crash severity.”

More recently Abbott pointed to developments such as lane departure technologies, forward collision warnings, detection alerts, autonomous braking, cameras, driver monitoring and even automatic transmissions that have improved safety.

J.B. Hunt Transport Services Vice President of Safety and Compliance Joshua Vance said maintaining a focus on driver satisfaction has manifested in safety gains for the company.

“The decision was made to really shift the focus of the company to making the life of the driver better,” said Vance, noting that Hunt has consistently reduced preventable crashes since the issue peaked in the 1990s. “We did that by completely revamping the pay package and getting away from really pushing freight, to ‘How can we take care of our drivers?’ ”

Vance stressed that improvements in safety and behavior were evident immediately, and set the company on a course that continues to this day. That included adopting collision mitigation systems as early as 2011, followed by efforts to improve side collision mitigation and driver monitoring with forward and inward cameras.

Tracking Weather

More recently Hunt has sharpened its focus on mitigating the effects of adverse weather through use of Drivewyze Safety+. To be sure, weather is a safety priority for many fleets.

Covenant Logistics has maintained a weather program since 2003, noted Misti Olszewski, vice president of enterprise safety.

“Our weather program has developed a lot over the years,” Olszewski said. “We have a full-time meteorologist that works for us in the safety department and he runs our weather program because weather happens more than just in winter. There are hurricanes, there’s dust storms, there’s winds in Wyoming, winds in Virginia. Just all kinds of weather that impacts the country.”

Still, Covenant bolsters its weather program during the winter months with an additional 20 people. It also deploys integrated data technologies to improve weather analysis and find ways to reroute loads around weather-affected lanes.

“We identify at-risk behaviors using leading indicators, so we have a lot of different technology,” said Michael Lasko, Assistant General Manager at Boyle Transportation.

“When we talk about the Boyle safety program, really it’s an individualized behavior-based safety program.”

Lasko stressed that a key strategy is to break down a fleet’s overall operations to identify where to focus on improving driver behavior, instead of the near-impossible task of individualizing an entire fleet. From there, he breaks that group down further into rate of incidents. In his experience about 20% of drivers are causing most of the safety issues.

“We want to work with our drivers in a very positive way,” Lasko said. “Now that we’ve defined a manageable target group, we have to identify the gaps, and we do that with training. We are very serious about training. We want comprehensive questions that help us gauge your level of retention of the materials covered.”