Trucking industry strategy: Safer drivers, safer roads

PEORIA, Ill. — The drivers of commercial motor vehicles, semis and buses, hold a key to making the country’s roadways safer.

“A driver who stays in the industry longer is a safer driver, stays on the road longer, safer driver,” said Winsome Lenfert.

Lenfert is an Indiana native who formerly worked as the deputy associate administrator for airports with the Federal Aviation Administration.

She has her eyes on the road now as the Midwest regional administrator for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Lenfert kicked off the 2024 Midwest Truck and Trailer Show, sponsored by the Mid-West Truckers Association, in Peoria, as the opening session keynote speaker.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Roadway Safety Strategy is the agency’s first step toward a goal of reaching zero roadway fatalities.

The strategy has five areas of focus: safer people, safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds and post-crash care.

The FMCSA is partnering with the U.S. DOT in that strategy, Lenfert said. The agency is looking at what can be done at the driver level.

“We are focusing on what we call root causes. Some of those include improving driver safety and quality of life. We are looking at recruitment and retention, compensation, detention time and truck parking,” Lenfert said.

She told the audience of drivers, owner and operators, and other trucking industry officials that keeping drivers driving has been shown to result in safer drivers.

“Our research shows, especially in the retention piece, which goes along with all of those quality of life aspects, that a driver who stays in the industry longer is a safer drivers,” she said.

Lenfert said part of the responsibility of keeping and growing that pool of longtime drivers rests with her agency.

“If we can improve some of those things and eliminate some of the barriers once they are in the industry, they will stay in the industry,” she said.

Lenfert, who marked her one-year anniversary at FMCSA at the truck show, acknowledged that there is work to be done with systems that truckers are required to use and that they often find frustrating to use, such as the registration system.

“We are continuing to work on enhancing the registration, vetting, audits and CDL processes, as well as our drug and alcohol programs. We know we have a lot of difficulty with our registration system. I will leave it at that,” she said.

“We have frustrations internally and I know you, as users, have them, as well. We really want your feedback. We will be making changes to that system and we need your input on how to make it better.”

While acknowledging the frustrations, Lenfert said the agency is taking measured steps to use modernization and technology as part of the safer roads strategy.

“We will continue to look at ways to leverage technology to make our roads safer. We want to embrace technology, but we also want to do it incrementally, cautiously and in ways that we have driver and industry input in those changes,” she said.

Education and communication also will continue to be a vital tool toward reducing crashes.

“That can be something as simple as our ‘wear a seatbelt’ campaign. That campaign has been around for a very long time, but we still have drivers dying from not wearing a seatbelt. It’s sad. It’s children, adults, professional truck drivers,” Lenfert said.

Other parts of the strategy include speed reduction, preventing distracted driving and promoting and enforcing work zone awareness.

“So many of the crashes we see are the result of activity in work zones,” Lenfert said.

She emphasized that her agency and the other U.S. transportation agencies are focusing safety and education efforts on everyone who uses public roadways and that all of those groups bear responsibility for making roads safer.

“It’s all of us on the roads. It’s everybody that shares. It’s the bicyclist to the commercial vehicle driver. All of us are on the roads, sharing the roads together and we all have that responsibility,” she said.