Author: Bob Ragazzo – Certified Defensive Driving Instructor
If you manage and train drivers of service vehicles, medium duty vans or 18-wheelers, you’ve probably experienced your share of right-side or ‘blind-side’ collisions and near-collisions.
The first step is to understand why this happens. The answer is a simple one. The majority of drivers who are on the road today, have NEVER LEARNED how to drive around trucks!
It’s hard to believe but true. Recall your own driver training. Did it include any instruction about a truck’s blind spots, or how to properly drive around trucks? Not likely.
Maybe you were fortunate enough to have an exceptional teacher (maybe a Driver’s Ed instructor or a Dad or other Family Member) who actually taught you about this, but for the vast majority of drivers – they just don’t know where the blind spots are on a Truck or Service Vehicle!
The statistics bear this out:
According to a NHTSA / Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration report – https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/sites/fmcsa.dot.gov/files/2022..pdf – approximately 65% of truck crashes that were studied, were caused by the driver of the truck changing lanes and hitting a vehicle that was (presumably) sitting in a blind spot. Alternatively, in many of these crashes, the truck was hit by another vehicle that was encroaching on the truck’s lane.
In nearly 20% of these cases, the truck driver was not involved in the first impact at all.
What can you do to mitigate this risk?
Here are 5 practical solutions:
1) Awareness of the problem is a big step. Consistently remind your drivers to always assume that the driver of the other vehicle has never been trained to drive around trucks. (We also refer to this as ‘anticipate stupidity’ from other drivers.)
2) Make proper mirror adjustment, (to minimize blind spots,) a part of your pre-flight checklist. We have done thousands of driver evaluations, and improper mirror adjustment shows up in nearly 60% of these! Taking an extra minute to properly set mirrors before starting out is a simple thing that could save a life.
3) Remember the National Safety Council motto – “yield, yield and yield some more.” We’re not suggesting that you teach your drivers to be tentative, but employing sound Defensive Driving techniques goes a long way toward avoiding crashes. After all, it doesn’t matter much who was at fault if everyone ends up in a body cast. A safe and defensive driver avoids collisions at all times.
4) Stay as far to the right as possible. Advise your drivers to keep all vehicles to their left whenever practical. Merging traffic is a concern, and lane position needs to be managed accordingly.
5) Minimize lane changes. The majority of blind side crashes occur when one or more vehicles change lanes. Many drivers have what we call ‘lane change disease’ ; mistakenly thinking that they can get where they’re going much faster by jumping in and out of traffic. Not only do frequent lane changes greatly increase their chance of having a crash – they rarely save more than a few minutes.
When lane changes are necessary, we recommend a technique that is familiar to many safe driving professionals – SMOG (Signal, Mirror, Over – the – Shoulder and Go).
SMOG is effective when moving to the left, but is difficult when moving to the right, unless the driver has a passenger who can do the ‘over the shoulder ‘ part for them.
If the driver is alone, we suggest that they Signal, Check the side-view mirror, issue two quick blasts of the horn (to alert any encroaching vehicles) and merge into the lane gradually.
To sum up, there is no magic formula that will eliminate right-side or ‘blind-side’ crashes, but employing these 5 techniques consistently and maintaining ‘top-of-mind’ awareness of the problem, will help to reduce these types of collisions gradually and can work toward establishing a new norm in your organization.