Distraction in Commercial Trucks and Buses: Assessing Prevalence and Risk in Conjunction with Crashes and Near-Crashes

Abstract

The aim of this project was to use an existing naturalistic data set to document the prevalence and risk of commercial truck and bus drivers activities or actions that distract their attention away from the driving task. This naturalistic data set involved thousands of commercial motor vehicles(including trucks and buses) and provided a wealth of data, including driver behavior during safety-critical events. The data set was provided by DriveCam a vendor of onboard safety monitoring systems (OBMS) aimed at reducing risky driving behaviors. The OBMS contains video recordings and data from kinematic sensors (e.g., vehicle speed) in order to study driver behavior in driving conditions in the presence of real world daily pressures. These video recordings and kinematic data are used by fleet safety managers to provide feedback on safe and at-risk driving behaviors. Note that the authors of this study did not receive any video recordings, but rather kinematic data and driver behavior data that did not identify the driver.