Indexing gives perspective on driver violations

June 1, 2003
STUDIES show that slightly more than 50 percent of roadside inspections are not reported by drivers to their companies. That means that you only know

STUDIES show that slightly more than 50 percent of roadside inspections are not reported by drivers to their companies. “That means that you only know 48.3 percent of what the feds know,” said Jim York of Zurich Service Corp.

He made the remarks while discussing a driver indexing program that enables carriers to build a complete safety performance picture of their drivers. The indexing program allows carriers to combine data from multiple existing sources, for example accident history, roadside inspection results, and moving violations.

With the information in hand, carriers can “Time and Severity” score each safety violation similar to the process used by Safety Status Measurement System (SafeStat), an automated analysis system developed for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Using that approach, companies can build driver-specific safety score summaries by driver name.

York suggested that companies use the information to identify high-risk drivers. Once the pool, for example the worst 25 percent of high-risk drivers, is identified, carriers can focus their intervention and training efforts on these individuals.

“We find that past safety history of a driver is the best predictor of future crash involvement,” said York. “Targeting improvement efforts on those drivers results in fewer crashes, claims and, ultimately, lower insurance costs.”