Transportation Business Resources

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A clip from a podcast begins. Tim Dooner sits behind a desk covered with truck-related items, including model trucks, shoes and a small spinning wheel. The "What the Truck?!?" logo appears prominently. A sidebar lists today's show topics, including "Biggest BS on the Road" and "Distracted Driving." A logo for Sirius XM appears across the top, with icons for YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Apple Podcast, Spotify, TikTok and X.

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TIM DOONER: Right now, Chris Hayes is Assistant Vice President of Workers Comp and Transportation Risk over at Travelers. Going to join us for five or 10 minutes to give us a quick message on distracted driving. Chris, it's great to have you back. Important month. And you know what? There's so much talk in trucking. I was– I'm not going to say I was surprised, Chris, because truck drivers complain a lot, but in a sense I was surprised to the main issue was distracted driving. Still a massive problem.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, I think the line of biggest BS on the road sounds about right. The story that he told reminds me of driving out of Hartford one day. I'm in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I look at the car next to me, and I think, wow, that's a really good episode of that TV show. And I realize this person is watching television on their phone while we're in bumper-to-bumper traffic. And if I can recognize it from my car, that's not a good sign as to how distracted she is.

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Text: Chris Hayes, Assistant V.P., Workers Compensation and Transportation Risk Control, Travelers. 

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DOONER: Yeah. Look, Chris, I was going to say it all comes down to the driver, but 78% of crashes are caused by other drivers. But still, it does come down to you, the driver. You're in control of that vehicle. You have to look out for that other 78% who may be causing an accident. Does that still hold true? Do you still think the driver is the most important cog in your safety system?

CHRIS HAYES: Oh, absolutely. Until cars drive themselves. And I don't have a lot of confidence in that. In fact, I was watching your episode from Friday and your autonomous truck developers moving to “Maybe we need people still in those trucks.”

DOONER: I know.

CHRIS HAYES: We're still going to need people. And stat after stat will show that the driver is something like 95% of the root cause of accidents. Now, it might be your driver. It might be the car that's driving with them. Stats, as you point out, do show that in light vehicle/heavy vehicle collisions, it's usually the light vehicle that's primary cause of the accident. But it is people that make these things happen.

DOONER: So it is distracted driver awareness month. CVSA– we had a PSA for them. It was actually a great one. It gave you a real nice bird's-eye view of what drivers really see and how quick that road can change in front of you. But how is the data changed? How is the issue changed? I know they look into this. So what exactly is going on? Can you break it down for us?

CHRIS HAYES: When you think about distracted driving, it's really just something that compounds all the other things that you're doing. So imagine you are– like, I went to the gym this morning, and there was a truck parked in the parking lot. Clearly the guy's in his sleeper. Be distracted all you want. The vehicle shut down, not moving. But when you're driving on a crowded highway, going 65, 70 miles per hour, and it's raining, not a good time to be distracted.

So think about distraction as all those skills that you have as a driver. It just erodes all of them. Because the most important thing is to be able to see where you're going and have the space between you and the vehicles around you. So you've got to be able to keep that space.

DOONER: What did we– Oh, yeah. Keep going.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah. So one thing that was really interesting is every year the CVSA has something called Operation Safe Driver. And what they do is go and do a lot of enforcement over the course of a week in July. I'm sure your listeners might not appreciate the extra enforcement, but it is for a good cause, which is to encourage safe driving behaviors.

So last year, they went out and they– July 7, July 13– they went out and pulled over 11,000 vehicles. So that's both commercial drivers and passenger drivers. So what do you think are the most common thing they found for commercial drivers was?

DOONER: This one– and I don't mean to give away, and I'll give the audience three seconds to guess. One, two, three. Because this one actually– it surprised me. I don't know. Maybe it shouldn't have surprised me. It seemed almost boomer-esque. It was still seat belts, right? Like drivers still not wearing their safety belt.

CHRIS HAYES: So it's actually number one was about 2,000 of those 11,000 tickets were for commercial drivers for speeding.

DOONER: Oh, speeding. Safety belts was up there pretty high, though, wasn't it?

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, seat belts actually number two. So speeding was– speeding number one. Speeding is absolutely the key thing to maintain safety. So something like 12,000 people a year die in speeding-related crashes out of the 40,000 who die on the road every year. So speed is the thing that takes out your following distance. It takes out your ability to react. So speeding is absolutely critical, especially when you're driving a commercial vehicle with air brakes.

But you hit seat belts. So again, out of the 11,000 tickets that were given, 800 were tickets or warnings to commercial drivers for seat belts. Now, what surprised you about that?

DOONER: What surprises me about that? Well, if you're speeding and not wearing a seat belt, you might not remain in the truck for very long.

CHRIS HAYES: That's actually the big thing. So a lot of people think about seat belts as, well, it's my space. It's my safety. Why is it any of your concern whether or not I wear a seat belt? But the key thing, the reason why it's so important, is if you are in a collision, the thing that keeps that collision from getting worse is your natural reaction to grab the wheel, hit the brakes, control your vehicle, which you can't do if you got bounced into the passenger seat. And you've seen enough interior cameras of people getting to crash without seat belts on. You know you never stay in that seat.

So it's about your protection, but it's also the protection for everyone else who is in the vehicle or in the vicinity of your vehicle. Keep your vehicle straight, steady, stopped, which you can't do if you're bouncing to the passenger side.

DOONER: No, I mean, if you've seen any of the videos, and I share them from time to time. Now that we have inward-facing dash cams, when you see a truck roll over, it's like the inside of a dryer. That dryer– the driver and anything that's not tied down is going everywhere. So I mean, it's almost like, OK, obviously you shouldn't speed. You should wear your seat belt. What else did you find out on this one?

CHRIS HAYES: Well, one thing I did want to hit about the seat belt thing, when I was starting off in trucking, it was pretty common for someone to get pulled over, and they would say, hey, instead of writing me a speeding ticket, how about you just give me a seat belt violation? Therefore, I don't get it on my MVR. And sometimes the officer would do that.

What's interesting is because of that risk of you getting bounced out of the passenger seat, not wearing a seat belt is actually worse on your MVR in most states, and it shows up higher on the company's SMS scores. So not wearing a seat belt is not a lower violation. It's actually a bigger violation, which is important for people to remember.

DOONER: Interesting. So what are we doing about some of these responses? How do we improve upon the safety?

CHRIS HAYES: Well, first of all, we got to think about this month. So this is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month. Most people think of it as Distracted Driving Month, which is not really it. We really want people to stop being distracted.

DOONER: Sure.

CHRIS HAYES: So keeping a sense of your main job on the road is to get your vehicle someplace safely. So any secondary task you might think about doing, especially if you were in the office calling your drivers. Like, think about why do we need to call you right now. Can I communicate with any of the million devices we have right now?

When I started in trucking, you called your dispatcher twice a day, and somehow the economy still kept turning. So you've got to be able to pull out of this sense that you've got to be connected all the time and just focus on the task of driving. Because when we don't do that well, it hurts too many people.

DOONER: Yeah, I mean, safety people are always talking about telematics. Where do they fit into this? So of course the driver is the main cog. But how does the organization, I guess, fit in via that?

CHRIS HAYES: That's interesting. So I've been working on finding ways to make telematics work in an improved way for safety since 2009, and I'm still working at it. So I'm 15 years into trying to perfect the model, and I think we actually got nailed this time. So one thing that we found is– and people in your audience probably appreciate this– you put a system in, and you say, I'm going to look at every video, everyone who runs a stop sign, every alert. I'm going to check all of them. I'm going to talk to every driver. Then you get a week into it, and you say there's too much.

So we had one customer we were talking to, and we were talking about the flow of information coming in, and they said, we get 3,000 alerts every morning between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. So which ones do you look at? And then when you don't look at those, are you now in more trouble because you didn't look at the one that was really crucial?

So what we're trying to help our customers do is think about something called metrics that matter. And I thank my friend Barney, who might be listening, for coming up with that great name. And it is look at that wealth of data you get from cameras and telematics and GPS and engines– all that information– and say, which of these stats actually matters the most to me today to keep my fleet safe?

And then can you turn that into things you can actually use to coach your drivers? Don't just say, hey, you were bad, but hey, you're one of the best drivers. You are on the wrong side of best. And be able to not just look at it on a daily basis, but work with your telematics provider and say, I don't want to report every minute for every driver. What I want is once a week, once a month, I want to see my best. I want to see my worst. I want a simple scorecard to help people understand where they are. That way I know who I can coach and who I can give feedback to.

I really believe everyone's out there every day trying to do a good job, doing their best. We just need redirection sometimes, and especially when drivers are out there and they're not driving safely, it's you and your truck. You might not really appreciate how you are compared to your peers. So to have someone sit down with you and say, hey, you're really killing it out there. However, you speed more than anyone else, and you have more harsh brakes than anyone else, and the camera says you're more distracted than anyone else. What can we do to make sure you stay safe and the vehicles around you stay safe?

DOONER: Chris, we're just about out of time. Where can people go to learn about the metrics that matter, check out some of this coaching, and put some of what you talked about into action and make this distracted driving month mean something?

CHRIS HAYES: Absolutely. Well, we're going to service market soon. So don't steal the name quite yet. But go to travelers dot com, go to the risk control site, or to prepare and prevent. And you can see all our content on how to keep your vehicle safe.

DOONER: Very cool. Chris, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for stopping by the show. Take care. Good stuff.