No Correlation Between Safety, Length of Training, ATRI Says
By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter
This story appears in the May 19 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
A study conducted by the American Transportation Research Institute found there is no correlation between the length of a training program and safety performance.
ATRI’s study, released May 7, concluded there is “little variation among driver safety performance that can be explained by training program duration.”
“As a fleet, we have long be-lieved that the litmus test for commercial driver training should be performance-based and not a derivative of hours spent in training,” said Chad England, vice president of recruiting, training and safe driving for C.R. England Inc.
Late last year, the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration proposed revising its regulations governing the training of new truck drivers to include “a minimum of 76 hours of classroom instruction and 44 hours of behind-the-wheel training for a total of 120 hours.”
The proposal also would require drivers to receive their training at a federally accredited education center. The public comment period is set to close May 23.
The previous rule was tossed out by a federal court in 2005 for failing to mandate time behind the wheel as part of a training program. It required 10.5 hours of classroom instruction.
For its research, ATRI looked at 10 different training programs and the safety results from six fleets — three large truckload carriers, one less-than-truckload, a specialized fleet and a household goods mover — representing nearly 16,700 drivers.
Roughly 71% of those drivers, ATRI said, were not involved in a safety incident, and 20% were involved in just one. The most common type of accident — 5,603 of them — was property damage.
There were 416 DOT-reportable incidents and 959 traffic convictions handed down to drivers in the study.
The 10 training programs ranged in length from 88 hours to 272 hours, ATRI said.
The study concluded that the lack of a relationship between driver safety and the number of hours spent training could be interpreted by some as meaning that adding even greater numbers of hours might reduce crashes, but “the lack of a safety-improvement trend line towards the longer duration programs does not provide the researchers with a basis for this conclusion.”
American Trucking Associations has opposed FMCSA’s proposal, arguing that the hours-based curriculum will hurt smaller fleets and training schools. In addition, the accreditation requirements may disqualify smaller schools and fleets that operate their own training programs.
The federation instead has pressed for a performance-based training standard.
