Sometimes the most obvious things escape observation. Or maybe it’s because other stuff just obscures the details.

I recently attended the 2005 International Conference on Fatigue Management in Transport Operations conference in Seattle. There, during her keynote address, Annette Sandberg, chief of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), said her agency’s primary focus would soon be switching from vehicles and administrative concerns to human factors. “Driver factors,” she said, “were up to 10 times more prevalent than vehicle or environmental factors in events that led to crashes between one tractor trailer and a single passenger vehicle.”

No kidding, Sherlock.

Trucks seldom jackknife all by themselves. Sure, vehicle defects play a role, but data consistently show vehicle condition is a contributing factor to a crash in a very small percentage of cases. Drivers, Sandberg says, “were considered fatigued about six to 10 percent of
the time.”

That’s not an alarming number, considering the hours and miles piled onto the statistical pallet every day of the year. For the record, she noted that passenger car drivers were deemed fatigued at twice the rate of truck drivers. Ya gotta savour the little victories.

Later in the session, Ralph Craft, one of FMCSA’s senior researchers gave attendees a preliminary look at the data contained in the soon-to-be-released Large Truck Crash Causation Study. It was pretty clear from the evidence he presented that brakes weren’t much of an issue at all, nor were wheel-offs, bald tires, or faulty lighting.

Most of the nearly 1,000 heavy truck crashes examined in the study could be traced to driver error or bad decision making. Craft says driver training, attitude and aptitude, and even certain medical conditions are at least partially to blame. And that’s why Sandberg’s remarks about rearranging the safety agency’s focus are so interesting.

No one in Canada is on this page yet. There’s a great push on in Canada at the moment to revise trip inspection standards, and Ontario, for one, is planning a major rewrite of some legislation (Bill 169) that will enable stiffer fines for drivers who fail to properly detect and note vehicle defects.

By the time Ontario gets its legislative act together, FMCSA will be looking deeply into driver medical standards, driver qualifications, and other human factors as a means of lowering the fatal crash rate.

Among the initiatives FMCSA will be looking at is fatigue management. In the literal sense, fatigue management plans will rely less on prescriptive standards and more on the driver’s ability to manage time and the responsibilities of the job. There will always be HOS rules of some sort, but this talk of real fatigue management shows promise.

In fact, there is a pilot project underway right now that’s gathering evidence against prescriptive HOS rules. Several drivers — all of whom have been extensively trained in the black art of fatigue management — are running under the current HOS rules, but are keeping separate diaries of the times of day when they feel tired but have to keep working lest they mess up on HOS compliance. As well, they’re noting times of day when they feel up to the task of driving even though the rules say they should be parked.

This particular project is being run by a couple of the big guns in American transportation research, William Dement and Greg Belenky. The two say that they will eventually petition FMCSA for exemptions for this handful of drivers so they can run legally under their own direction to further the test. If successful, this project would be a huge step forward in fatigue management, and a huge improvement over existing HOS rules. We wait with baited breath for the outcome of that bit of research.

And one more interesting note about Sandberg’s remarks at the conference. She said that FMCSA is about to partner with Transport Canada and several Canadian and US jurisdictions to move forward with a fatigue management plan. Perhaps someone ought to point out that Alberta has had a similar study on the go for the past three years. The Yanks aren’t always on the leading edge, but it’s very Canadian to keep our triumphs to ourselves.