Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) has taken up the operation under Safe Driver Campaign. The report has been recently released by CVSA which points out on three major safety concerns. The warnings as per the citations were issued to the vehicle drivers and trucking companies for both commercial and non-commercial drivers. The three safety violations were speeding, traffic signal disobeying and not using the seat belts.
If we consider the percentages than speeding was the number one. The 2009 figures for commercial drivers suggests there were 20.3 % cases of over-speeding reported whereas for traffic signal violations and seat belt violations were 4.2 percent and 2.6 percent respectively. Similar violations were tracked for car drivers and the percentage violation for car drivers was found to be even higher.
According to 2010 commercial driver’s safety alliance report, the reported cases followed the similar trend with maximum number of safety issues were for speeding. There were 13.7 percentage of speeding related safety concerns. For traffic signal disobeying and failing to use seat belt while driving the car were 4.6 and 10 percent respectively. However 2010, witnessed more cases of non usage of the seat belts while driving.
Since 2007 a program has been launched Operation Safe Driver. This was brought up by CVSA and Federal Carrier Safety Administration to look on the issues to create more awareness and improve the driving pattern of the drivers. The measures are taken to educate and enforce safe driving strategies especially on the drivers whose truck driving job has been found more risky. On 17th to 23 rd October 2010 the fourth annual Operation Safe Driver was conducted in which 53,000 commercial vehicle driver were brought forward.
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The executive director Stephen Keppler addressed that this drive is proving really beneficial and they will continue to focus on the driver behavior that become the main cause of road accidents and in worse cases the cause of life losses.
Many other steps have been taken by several official bodies. One such step that everybody is looking forward is the rule making by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for speed limiters. Though there has been a heated debate on this rule making but the NHTSA is clearing its path for it and intend to lay down its proposal in this line by 2012.