New report helps fleets gauge drivers' crash risk

No truck fleet can avoid road accidents completely, but a new report offers some insights into which drivers are most at risk of a crash. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), the research arm of the American Trucking Associations, has released an update to its Crash Predictor Model, which quantifies the likelihood of an individual's future crash involvement based on specific truck driving behaviors.

The analysis draws on data from over 435,000 U.S. truck drivers over a two-year period to identify nearly a dozen factors that raise a driver's risk of being involved in a future crash, according to ATRI. Now in its third release, the updated ATRI crash predictor model includes analyses of the impact of age and gender on crash probability as well as data on industry average crash costs across six distinct crash types and severity.

Key findings include the following:

• Two behaviors that double the chances of a future crash are a reckless driving violation and a "failure to yield right of way" violation.
  
  
• Drivers who were previously involved in crashes are 74 percent more likely than others to be in a future crash.
  
  
• Women truck drivers were safer than their male counterparts in every statistically significant safety behavior.
  
  
• Men were 20 percent more likely to be involved in a crash than women were.

To download a free copy of the full report, visit atri-online.org.