While drivers have expressed concerns about driver-facing cameras, their impact on drivers safety is still being investigated by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI). This is especially pertinent as the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) recently released the results of Operation Safe Driver Week, which took place from July 10-16.
Throughout the seven-day awareness and outreach period, officers pulled over 35,000 commercial motor vehicle and passenger drivers for warnings and citations.
In total, the CVSA issued 26,164 warnings and citations combined for unsafe driving behavior in the U.S. and Canada combined for both commercial and passenger vehicles. Within this statistic, speeding was a top violation.
For commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers in the U.S. and Canada, speeding/violating basic speed law/driving too fast for condition warnings made up 56% of warnings and 48% of citations. Trailing significantly behind speed violations, failure to obey traffic control devices or the failure to use a seatbelt, which comprised of 20% of warnings and 24% of citations, respectively, were the second-most cause of driver-impacted pullovers during the CVSA’s Safe Driver Week.
Critically, ATRI’s “Predicting Truck Crash Involvement” reported that when a CMV driver receives a speeding violation, their likelihood of being in a crash increases by 47%. However, some of these behaviors can be mitigated by driver-facing cameras, despite driver hesitancy around the topic. In a video produced by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the organization estimated that 63,000 crashes could be avoided if camera-based video systems were widely adopted, including driver-facing cameras.
