WIT Teams Up with FMCSA for Safety

New Program Aims to Improve Safety

With 12 million trucks and buses on America’s roadways, safety is more critical than ever.

To help raise public awareness about sharing the road safely with these large vehicles, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) recently launched a national safety campaign: Our Roads, Our Safety.

The FMCSA collaborated with public and private sector entities, including the Women In Trucking Association (WIT), to educate passenger vehicle drivers, commercial motor vehicle drivers, motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians on how to safely co-exist on the road. WIT President and CEO Ellen Voie serves on the committee that created the program.

“Many people think that trucks operate just like cars. They don’t understand that they are much more difficult to maneuver, have massive blind spots, and take far longer to stop,” Voie explains. “By helping them to understand and accommodate these differences, we can improve safety for all drivers.”

Professional Driver and WIT Image Team member Ingrid Brown is one of the spokespeople for the new Voices of Safety public awareness campaign which includes video, audio and social media messages.

Brown got her first truck in 1979. Since then, she’s logged more than four million miles of safe driving and has received many professional awards.

In a new video, she recounts a recent experience with a driver who stopped dead on the road in front of her, nearly causing a collision. Brown was able to avoid an accident because she takes care not to follow vehicles too closely, but it was extremely difficult for her to stop.

“Whether you’re walking, whether you’re riding a bicycle, whether you’re in a car, we can’t maneuver as fast as all those people can,” she explains.

Brown hopes that, by sharing a driver’s perspective on the road, she can help to effect change. “Safety is my number one goal,” she says. n

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