Individual Differences and the “High-Risk” Commercial Driver

Safety is a principal focus of government agencies and private-sector organizations concerned with transportation. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) was established within the Department of Transportation on January 1, 2000, pursuant to the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999. Formerly a part of the Federal Highway Administration, the FMCSA's primary mission is to prevent commercial motor vehicle-related fatalities and injuries. Administration activities contribute to ensuring safety in motor carrier operations through strong enforcement of safety regulations, targeting high-risk carriers and commercial motor vehicle drivers; improving safety information systems and commercial motor vehicle technologies; strengthening commercial motor vehicle equipment and operating standards; and increasing safety awareness. To accomplish these activities, the Administration works with federal, state, and local enforcement agencies, the motor carrier industry, labor, safety interest groups, and others. In addition to safety, security-related issues are also receiving significant attention in light of the terrorist events of September 11, 2001. Administrators, commercial truck and bus carriers, government regulators, and researchers often face problems for which information already exists, either in documented form or as undocumented experience and practice. This information may be fragmented, scattered, and underevaluated. As a consequence, full knowledge of what has been learned about a problem may not be brought to bear on its solution. Costly research findings may go unused, valuable experience may be overlooked, and due consideration may not be given to recommended practices for solving or alleviating the problem. There is information available on nearly every subject of concern to commercial truck and bus safety. Much of it derives from research or from the work of practitioners faced with problems in their day-today work. To provide a systematic means for assembling and evaluating such useful information and to make it available to the commercial truck and bus industry, the Commercial Truck and Bus Safety Synthesis Program (CTBSSP) was established by the FMCSA to undertake a series of studies to search out and synthesize useful knowledge from all available sources and to prepare documented reports on current practices in the subject areas of concern. Reports from this endeavor constitute the CTBSSP Synthesis series, which collects and assembles the various forms of information into single concise documents pertaining to specific commercial truck and bus safety problems or sets of closely related problems The CTBSSP, administered by the Transportation Research Board, began in early 2002 in support of the FMCSA's safety research programs. The …