Is your Pride getting in the way of safe driving?

Disclaimer: I’m as American as they come, from a family of veterans and Irish immigrants, even have a US Flag tattooed on my arm – but we as Americans have too much confidence in our driving abilities. I’m certainly not dogging Americans in general – examples like those people in Germany, though, easily outshine us in training and ability when it comes to driving. In fact, if you look at some of our habits and our staggering crash statistics, we’re not much better than most Third World countries when it comes to driving safely.

This placement in the world comes from one primary source – ego. The typical American driver always thinks they’re the best and everyone else on the road is the problem, which causes them to be overly confident and outdrive their abilities.

Let’s also establish some language. There’s no such thing, when it comes to driving, as an “accident.” Let’s call them what they are – crashes, wrecks, or perhaps the more politically correct “incidents.”

If these crashes were truly accidents, we wouldn’t see attorneys in wall-to-wall commercials on television advertising getting you millions for your wreck, especially if it involves an 18-wheeler.

Plaintiff’s attorneys make millions off of wrecks...think about it...if they were accidents, there would be no one to blame. And there’s always someone to blame.

I’ll set that line of thought aside for a moment and get back to training, confidence, and ego. Long gone are the days of mandatory driver’s education. That class that every teenager looked forward to usually between their freshman and sophomore years in high school. I know one of my football coaches gave us the class as we watched films like “Highway Terror” and saw carnage on the roadways. We then took turns driving the car with the coach in the front seat, and then we were off to get our license.

Some private companies offer driver’s education, but it is usually

astronomical in price and many people bypass the opportunity. So, we’re left with what I saw in Pennsylvania when my sons were going through the licensing process between 2002 and 2004. In the back of the driver’s training guide, there’s a place for a parent or guardian to sign off, certifying that the kid got “at least 50 hours” of behind-the-wheel time in various driving conditions. You and I both know very well that most parents didn’t spend 50 hours driving with their kids – maybe 50 minutes. And they pencil-whipped the form indicating that the teenager was ready to test.

Again, referencing Pennsylvania, also gone are the days of having a license evaluator riding in the car with the teen as they take their driving test. In fact, the driving test isn’t really a driving test any longer. The prospective licensee doesn’t even get out onto a public road. The evaluator stands by on the curb as your teen accomplishes a simple skills test in a parking lot, again with the observer not even in the car – I’m sure the powers-that-be determined it was much too stressful to have someone sitting in the car with you with that intimidating clipboard and checklist.

Do the math – a teenager reads the driver’s manual enough to make a passing grade on the written test, drives their mom or dad to the mall a couple of times, takes a “road test” in a parking lot, and they’re now a licensed driver. No formal training, no strong habits instilled, and not even the pressure of having someone ride with you in the car during the final test.

These are the people you’re hiring to drive your expensive towing equipment in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

I brought up Germany a minute ago – while most people haven’t driven in Germany, we may have seen scenes of the autobahn on TV and noted how German drivers “load” to the right of the travel lanes. They rarely go into the middle or left lane except for a brief moment to pass a slower vehicle, and when they do, they quickly return to the right lane. You’ll notice that we Americans “load” to the left. Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is more important than those in front of you. The right lane is almost empty. Ironically, it is illegal to be in those left lanes except when passing, but we tend to camp out there for long periods of time. This creates congestion, which in turn creates crashes. Or at least an increased potential for crashes.

It is illegal in most states to camp out in the left lane. It is also illegal in most jurisdictions to pass on the right, yet we see it often.

People are easy to observe and even easier to predict. I study traffic patterns as I drive, so I’ve come up with several scenarios that commonly appear: - A person is tailgating a big truck in the left lane. They’re literally 5 or 10 feet behind the truck and can’t possibly see anything to the front or sides of the truck. They then whip into the right lane to find a slower truck, and the reason the first truck was in the left lane – they’re passing a slower truck. The person stomps their brakes and darts back into the left lane, usually cutting off another driver who was positioning to tailgate the truck. This person, because they were tailgating, had a panic braking situation and two erratic lane changes. By the way, the reason they jumped into the right lane was that they hoped to get past the truck in the left lane, and then cut them off, “shooting the gap” in

front of the faster truck. They don’t realize, of course, that 95% of the time during their crazy maneuvers, they’re in the faster truck’s blind spot until the last minute when that truck driver sees the top of their car shoot past.

- People don’t know how to merge. This is not restricted to one city or state – this is all over. People run up to the end of a freeway on-ramp and then slam on their brakes because they don’t understand how to merge with traffic. There have been more rear-end collisions because of this scenario than just about anything else out there.

Same goes with losing a lane due to construction or traffic incident. People aren’t paying attention or are too arrogant to care, and they run up to the “choke point,” and cut in at the last minute, usually forcing the entire line of vehicles to stop or slow down for them. You wouldn’t cut in line at the movie theater, why do it in traffic? That’s an easy one to answer – you’re anonymous on the road and have no direct repercussions.

- A driver will run up behind another vehicle, get really close, and slow down to the speed of the vehicle they’re tailgating. This is all because they didn’t look ahead to notice they were gaining on the person. THEN, they see their predicament and try to change lanes. It takes the realization that you’re gaining on the vehicle to plan ahead and make your move safely to get around them. In my observation, though, people seem to drive while focusing only 20 feet in front of them – they don’t look ahead and see what’s happening so they can change their speed or their lane without disruption.

- Tailgating and crowding: You don’t know if the person in the vehicle in front of you sees you. You don’t know what they’re thinking. You don’t know that you might surprise them, and they’ll make an evasive maneuver... and you won’t have more than a second to respond.

The 3 leading causes of crashes in our country are following too close, merging collisions, and inattentive

drivers. “Space cushion” driving is a term used in safety circles that explains giving yourself enough room to predict what’s happening in front of you so you can make changes without getting your blood pressure up or causing another driver to make evasive maneuvers.

There is always a “causal factor” in crashes or near-misses. Near misses, by the way, are critically important to observe. Just because you didn’t crash this time doesn’t mean it won’t happen tomorrow if you keep practicing the same bad habits while driving.

These causal factors are blatantly simple, and one-on-one training in these 3 areas just might limit your liability and help productivity and profit.

They are:

Ignorance – you simply don’t know or understand the rules of the road and common courtesies that should take place while driving. Arrogance – you’re just too darned important to care about rules and courtesies, and also those other people out there with you. Apathy – you just don’t care and can’t be bothered with thinking of anyone other than yourself.

There are also the 3 Ds – Distracted, Drunk, and Drugs – that influence and impact the chance of crashes.

The $64 question is simple – how do we train people who haven’t received real driver training? You just train them, as in starting from scratch. As an employer, one of your many jobs is to reduce costs and liability for your company. Train your people. Take them out one-on-one and show them how to drive properly. Demonstrate obeying the rules and practicing common courtesies on the road, like safe following distances, proper lane selection and usage, and treating others with respect. Practicing these basic ideals will make you a better driver. I strongly believe that.

My dad wasn’t an educated man, but when I got my license at age 13 (farm provisional in Texas), he told me one very profound thing that has stuck with me ever since. He said, “You can pretty much do what you want when you’re driving, as long as you follow the law, and you don’t make another person change what they’re doing to deal with something you’re doing wrong.”

As tow operators, we value and cherish those cool skills and tricks we’ve learned for recoveries, but many of us don’t pay attention with the basic act of driving that we do the other 99% of our time. It’s that basic driving time that has the most potential for a problem and causing liability for you.

We are just not as good as we think we are, and we should be striving to improve our driving skills and train the people who work with us and for us.

I recommend the one-on-one training like I eluded to above. If you don’t feel qualified or don’t have the time, contact my friend Brian Riker for individual or group training similar to popular “space cushion” safety training in the driver safety world.

Brian Riker is the owner of Fleet Compliance Solutions and is a thirdparty CDL evaluator and driver trainer and specializes in comprehensive safe driver training.

Brian is at brian.riker@

fleetcompliancesolutions.net

and has the website http://www.yourdotguy.com/.