An investigation of the relationship between organizational climate and professional drivers’ driver behaviours

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between organizational climate and driver behaviours of professional drivers. The sample consisted of 230 male professional drivers. The participants completed a questionnaire including the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ), Hofstede’s Organizational Culture Scale, and a background information form. Results of the factor analysis of Hofstede’s Organizational Culture Scale yielded two dimensions, which were named as “work orientation” and “employee consideration”. Analyses of Covariance (ANCOVA) revealed significant main and interaction effects of organizational climate on errors, and violations after controlling for the statistical effects of age, annual mileage and the organization types. Drivers with low scores of work orientation reported significantly higher frequencies of errors and violations than drivers with high scores of work orientation. It was also found that drivers with low scores of employee consideration reported higher frequencies of errors and violations than drivers with high scores of employee consideration. The effect of interaction between work orientation and employee consideration dimensions was only found on the frequencies of violations.     

Transport company safety climate—The impact on truck driver behavior and crash involvement

Objective: The present study investigated the relationships between safety climate and driving behavior and crash involvement.

Methods: A total of 339 company-employed truck drivers completed a questionnaire that measured their perceptions of safety climate, crash record, speed choice, and aberrant driving behaviors (errors, lapses, and violations).

Results: Although there was no direct relationship between the drivers' perceptions of safety climate and crash involvement, safety climate was a significant predictor of engagement in risky driving behaviors, which were in turn predictive of crash involvement.

Conclusions: This research shows that safety climate may offer an important starting point for interventions aimed at reducing risky driving behavior and thus fewer vehicle collisions.     

Exploratory multinomial logit model–based driver injury severity analyses for teenage and adult drivers in intersection-related crashes

Objective: Teenage drivers are more likely to be involved in severely incapacitating and fatal crashes compared to adult drivers. Moreover, because two thirds of urban vehicle miles traveled are on signal-controlled roadways, significant research efforts are needed to investigate intersection-related teenage driver injury severities and their contributing factors in terms of driver behavior, vehicle–infrastructure interactions, environmental characteristics, roadway geometric features, and traffic compositions. Therefore, this study aims to explore the characteristic differences between teenage and adult drivers in intersection-related crashes, identify the significant contributing attributes, and analyze their impacts on driver injury severities.

Methods: Using crash data collected in New Mexico from 2010 to 2011, 2 multinomial logit regression models were developed to analyze injury severities for teenage and adult drivers, respectively. Elasticity analyses and transferability tests were conducted to better understand the quantitative impacts of these factors and the teenage driver injury severity model's generality.

Results: The results showed that although many of the same contributing factors were found to be significant in the both teenage and adult driver models, certain different attributes must be distinguished to specifically develop effective safety solutions for the 2 driver groups.

Conclusions: The research findings are helpful to better understand teenage crash uniqueness and develop cost-effective solutions to reduce intersection-related teenage injury severities and facilitate driver injury mitigation research.     

How well do parents manage young driver crash risks?

Motor vehicle crashes are extremely high among young drivers during at least the first year of licensure. Crash risks decline with increased experience, but the more newly licensed teenagers drive, the greater their risk exposure. Hence, the dilemma facing policy makers and parents is how to provide young drivers with driving experience without unduly increasing their crash risk. Graduated driver licensing policies serve to delay licensure and then limit exposure to the highest risk conditions after licensure, allowing young drivers to gain experience only under less risky driving conditions. A similar strategy is needed to guide parents. Parents do not appear to appreciate just how risky driving is for novice drivers and tend to exert less control over their teenage children's driving than might be expected. Recent research has demonstrated that simple motivational strategies can persuade parents to adopt driving agreements and impose greater restrictions on early teen driving.     

What vehicle features are considered important when buying an automobile? An examination of driver preferences by age and gender

Introduction

Certain vehicle features can help drivers avoid collisions and/or protect occupants in the event of a crash, and therefore, might play an important role when deciding which vehicle to purchase. The objective of this study was to examine the importance attributed to key vehicle features (including safety) that drivers consider when buying a car and its association with age and gender.

Methods

A sample of 2,002 Canadian drivers aged 18 years and older completed a survey that asked them to rank the importance of eight vehicle features if they were to purchase a vehicle (storage, mileage, safety, price, comfort, performance, design, and reliability). ANOVA tests were performed to: (a) determine if there were differences in the level of importance between features and; (b) examine the effect of age and gender on the importance attributed to these features.

Results

Of the features examined, safety and reliability were the most highly rated in terms of importance, whereas design and performance had the lowest rating. Differences in safety and performance across age groups were dependent on gender. This effect was most evident in the youngest and oldest age groups.

Conclusions

Safety and reliability were considered the most important features. Age and gender play a significant role in explaining the importance of certain features.

Impact on Industry

Targeted efforts for translating safety-related information to the youngest and oldest consumers should be emphasized due to their high collision, injury, and fatality rates.     

Risk factors for being the at-fault driver: A case–control study

Objective: It is estimated that road traffic accidents are globally responsible for approximately 1.2 million deaths and 20 to 50 million injuries. About 70% of traffic incidences (TIs) occur in developing countries and among countries with high TI rates; Iran is the first. The aim of this study was to measure the association between being responsible for a traffic accident and some vehicle, human; and environmental related factors in Yasuj, a city with a high incidence of road traffic injuries and deaths in Iran.

Methods: This is a time-, date-, and place-matched case–control study conducted in 2015 using all traffic accidents registered and investigated by police during 2012. In total, 194 drivers were considered the at-fault driver in a traffic accident and the 194 drivers in the same collisions were included in the analysis.

Results: Based on the results from multivariate conditional logistic regression, significant associations between vehicle maneuver (OR_{Turn to right or left/Moving forward} = 11.10, 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.77–69.58, P = .01) and age (odds ratio [OR] = 1.11, 95% CI, 1.004–1.22, P = .04) and the chance of being an at-fault driver were found.

Conclusion: Driver behavior–related interventions including training and law enforcement seem to be more effective in reducing road traffic accidents in Iran.     

Deriving heart rate variability indices from cardiac monitoring—An indicator of driver sleepiness

Objective: Driver fatigue is considered to be a major contributor to road traffic crashes. Cardiac monitoring and heart rate variability (HRV) analysis is a candidate method for early and accurate detection of driver sleepiness. This study has 2 objectives: to evaluate the (1) suitability of different preprocessing strategies for detecting and removing outlier heartbeats and spectral transformation of HRV signals and their impact of driver sleepiness assessment and (2) relation between common HRV indices and subjective sleepiness reported by a large number of drivers in real driving situations, for the first time.

Methods: The study analyzed >3,500 5-min driving epochs from 76 drivers on a public motorway in Sweden. The electrocardiograph (ECG) data were recorded in 3 studies designed to evaluate the physiological differences between awake and sleepy drivers. The drivers reported their perceived level of sleepiness according to the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS) every 5?min. Two standard methods were used for identifying outlier heartbeats: (1) percentage change (PC), where outliers were defined as interbeat intervals deviating >30% from the mean of the four previous intervals and (2) standard deviation (SD), where outliers were defined as interbeat interval deviating >4 SD from the mean interval duration in the current epoch. Three standard methods were used for spectral transformation, which is needed for deriving HRV indices in the frequency domain: (1) Fourier transform; (2) autoregressive model; and (3) Lomb-Scargle periodogram. Different preprocessing strategies were compared regarding their impact on derivation of common HRV indices and their relation to KSS data distribution, using box plots and statistical tests such as analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Student’s t test.

Results: The ability of HRV indices to discriminate between alert and sleepy drivers does not differ significantly depending on which outlier detection and spectral transformation methods are used. As expected, with increasing sleepiness, the heart rate decreased, whereas heart rate variability overall increased. Furthermore, HRV parameters representing the parasympathetic branch of the autonomous nervous system increased. An unexpected finding was that parameters representing the sympathetic branch of the autonomous nervous system also increased with increasing KSS level. We hypothesize that this increment was due to stress induced by trying to avoid an incident, because the drivers were in real driving situations.

Conclusions: The association of HRV indices to KSS did not depend on the preprocessing strategy. No preprocessing method showed superiority for HRV association to driver sleepiness. This was also true for combinations of methods for frequency domain HRV indices. The results prove clear relationships between HRV indices and perceived sleepiness. Thus, HRV analysis shows promise for driver sleepiness detection.     

Exposure-based assessment of the effectiveness of Michigan’s graduated driver licensing nighttime driving restriction

The objective of the study is to assess the effectiveness of Michigan’s graduated driver licensing (GDL) program in terms of nighttime driving restriction. The research uses the quasi-induced exposure technique to capture and represent the exposure and accident risk change of the impacted driver groups due to the implementation of the GDL program. Six years of Michigan accident data were used, including three years before the GDL implementation and three years after. The effectiveness of Michigan’s GDL program in terms of nighttime driving is reflected in several dimensions: for the impacted drivers (16- and 17-year-olds), there is a significant reduction of exposure compared to the reference group and a decrease in the relative accident involvement ratio (thus a reduced accident risk); and examination of time of day distributions of impacted teenage drivers shows that there is a conspicuous percentage drop of impacted teenage drivers at the point where the nighttime curfew starts. With the implementation of the GDL program, the affected group tends to drive increasingly more in the several hours prior to the restricted time period to avoid violating the curfew law. As opposed to the traditional exposure measurements such as population or licensed drivers, quasi-induced exposure technique has the capability of depicting the accident propensity and quantifying exposure change from different age groups.     

Trends over time in the risk of driver death: what if vehicle designs had not improved?

OBJECTIVES: Passenger vehicle driver death rates per million vehicle registrations declined steadily during calendar years 1985-2004. The present study sought to separate the effect of vehicle design changes from this trend. METHODS: Restricting the trend to a fixed set of model years removed the vehicle design effects, but there were still effects due to vehicle aging. Risk of driver death was found to increase each year vehicles aged, probably due to changes in vehicle use patterns. RESULTS: After separating out the vehicle design effects and making adjustments for the vehicle age effects, a different picture emerged of trends in death rates over time. Absent the vehicle design changes, the historical decline in driver fatality risk would have ended in 1993, with risk climbing ever since. This underlying trend has been obscured by changes in the vehicle fleet. CONCLUSIONS: The push for vehicle improvements has been worthwhile and can be credited with saving thousands of lives. However, the analysis shows that the gains in occupant protection from vehicle design improvements have been offset partially by an increasingly risky environment in recent years. Therefore, more attention needs to be paid to programs targeting improvement in roadway design and driver behavior.     

Analysis of effects of driver’s evasive action time on rear-end collision risk using a driving simulator

Introduction: Driver’s evasive action is closely associated with collision risk in a critical traffic event. To quantify collision risk, surrogate safety measures (SSMs) have been estimated using vehicle trajectories. However, vehicle trajectories cannot clearly capture presence and time of driver’s evasive action. Thus, this study determines the driver’s evasive action based on his/her use of accelerator and brake pedals, and analyzes the effects of the driver’s evasive action time (i.e., duration of evasive action) on rear-end collision risk. Method: Fifty drivers’ car-following behavior on a freeway was observed using a driving simulator. An SSM called “Deceleration Rate to Avoid Crash (DRAC)” and the evasive action time were determined for each driver using the data from the driving simulator. Each driver tested two traffic scenarios – Cars and Trucks scenarios where conflicting vehicles were cars and trucks, respectively. The factors related to DRAC were identified and their effects on DRAC were analyzed using the Generalized Linear Models and random effects models. Results: DRAC decreased with the evasive action time and DRAC was closely related to drivers’ gender and driving experience at the road sections where evasive action to avoid collision was required. DRAC was also significantly different between Cars and Trucks scenarios. The effect of the evasive action time on DRAC varied among different drivers, particularly in the Trucks scenario. Conclusions: Longer evasive action time can significantly reduce crash risk. Driver characteristics are more closely related to effective evasive action in complex driving conditions. Practical Applications: Based on the findings of this study, driver warning information can be developed to alert drivers to take specific evasive action that reduces collision risk in a critical traffic event. The information is likely to reduce the variability of the driver’s evasive action and the speed variations among different drivers.     

Can variations in visual behavior measures be good predictors of driver sleepiness? A real driving test study

Objective: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the association between variations in visual behavior measures and subjective sleepiness levels across age groups over time to determine a quantitative method of measuring drivers' sleepiness levels.

Method: A total of 128 volunteer drivers in 4 age groups were asked to finish 2-, 3-, and 4-h continuous driving tasks on expressways, during which the driver's fixation, saccade, and blink measures were recorded by an eye-tracking system and the subjective sleepiness level was measured through the Stanford Sleepiness Scale. Two-way repeated measures analysis of variance was then used to examine the change in visual behavior measures across age groups over time and compare the interactive effects of these 2 factors on the dependent visual measures.

Results: Drivers' visual behavior measures and subjective sleepiness levels vary significantly over time but not across age groups. A statistically significant interaction between age group and driving duration was found in drivers' pupil diameter, deviation of search angle, saccade amplitude, blink frequency, blink duration, and closure duration. Additionally, change in a driver's subjective sleepiness level is positively or negatively associated with variation in visual behavior measures, and such relationships can be expressed in regression models for different period of driving duration.

Conclusions: Driving duration affects drivers' sleepiness significantly, so the amount of continuous driving time should be strictly controlled. Moreover, driving sleepiness can be quantified through the change rate of drivers' visual behavior measures to alert drivers of sleepiness risk and to encourage rest periods. These results provide insight into potential strategies for reducing and preventing traffic accidents and injuries.     

"巡检"勿"漏检"

山区雾大、天寒地冻,-5℃的天气,干警们穿着毛衣毛裤。好像什么都没穿,硬梆梆的,脚和手都冻成石头了,什么感觉也没有。     

Are age-based licensing restrictions a meaningful way to enhance rural older driver safety? The need for exposure considerations in policy development

The stated and revealed travel behavior of a sample of 60 rural drivers aged 54-92 years provided a basis to explore the potential effectiveness of two common driver's license restrictions aimed at older drivers: time of day and road class. The potential utility and impact of these restrictions have not been explored with revealed data for jurisdictions with a large population of rural older drivers where automobile dependence is high. Data were drawn from a multiday Global Positioning System-based travel diary survey of rural older drivers in New Brunswick, Canada. Revealed travel data showed that over 50 percent of the rural drivers in the sample did not drive after dark, and 40 percent drove less than 1 percent of their total surveyed kilometers on major highways, higher rates than from participant-stated responses. The proportion of participants taking night trips and traveling on major highways decreased with age. The majority of trips taken after dark by all participants had a rural destination. The average daily kilometers driven on major highways by men and women aged 75 years and older was nearly identical (1.79 km/day). These exposure considerations suggest that restricting night travel and major highway travel for the oldest rural drivers (75 years and older) may have limited utility given that the majority of participants did not drive in these situations, and for those who did, most of their trips were in rural areas where enforcement could be expected to be limited. A better approach may be to encourage increased self-regulation through training, age-friendly upgrades to transportation infrastructure to help rural older drivers stay driving safely as long as possible, and the development of appropriate rural alternatives to help a driver transition to nondriver.     

"骂"与"哭"

当施工安全员没有一个不挨骂的,某个工人不戴安全帽被罚10元钱,背后就会骂你,而且骂得很难听.因此,当安全员必须经得起骂,这是安全员责任性的表示,是一个称职的安全员.     

"批"与"评"

有些领导和安全监管部门经常下基层检查,对于一些生产经营单位存在的安全隐患、违章违规等问题,往往逮住一顿狠"批".这种面对存在的安全问题,敢于较真,无疑值得肯定.     

"过错"莫"错过"

在预防事故工作中,有些事情看起来微不足道,实际上非同小可,有的小事捅出大娄子,懊悔不已;有的无视安全,酿成大祸;有的违章操作,命丧黄泉.俗话说:"沙粒虽小伤人眼,小雨久下会成灾."小过错与大祸端没有不可逾越的屏障,事物量变到一定程度就会引起质变,小过错不可小视.2004年12月20日河北省沙河市"11·20"铁矿火灾事故,造成数十人死亡,矿井发生火灾的原因查明为主井盲井电缆内燃引发坑木燃烧.     

"专管"与"群管"

在企业安全生产过程中,坚持安全生产管理专业技术人员的“专业管理”与一线广大职工群众的“群众管理”相结合的原则,做到既有安全生产管理专业技术人员的“专管”,又有一线广大职工群众积极参与的“群管”,两者相互补充完善、相互促进,是做好企业安全生产工作,防止或降低各种生产安全事故的有效手段之一。首先,安全生产管理专业技术人员在掌握国家有关法律法规、专业技术标准,各种设施、危险品的特性,以及安全防护装置的作用原理、用途等方面有明显优势。其在推广新技术,有计划地淘汰危险性高、安全性能差的设施,发现和处理深层次的重大事…     

"轿车"载客的"暗渡陈仓"

在经济较为发达的沿海城市,公有制单位用车在不断增加,司机队伍也不断扩大。这个层面的司机收入虽然较稳但也相对较低,无形中产生了一种较为独特的阶层:既有清闲处尊之优越感的一面,又有收入不上不下尴尬难言的一面。正由于如此,轿车,这里所说的主要指部分单位或公司所拥有的个人专用轿车。捎带载客,也有在所难免了。