Collaborators: Jelle de Vries, René de Koster, Daan Stam

The vast number of traffic accidents involving trucks and the often severe consequences of such accidents emphasize the relevance of research focusing on safe driving behavior of truck drivers. We studied the effect of the driver’s safety consciousness on safety behavior. Because drivers are not only facing the requirement to drive safely but also productively, we also examined the relationship between safety consciousness and productivity.

We have identified that a higher level of safety consciousness of long-haul truck drivers relates to a higher level of productivity. This finding is surprising, as the link between safety consciousness and productivity is not immediately evident. Theoretically it is also strange to assume that a higher level of safety consciousness continuously relates to a higher level of productivity, especially when considering that a strong emphasis on safety of an individual could divert his or her attention away from driving productively. Inspection of a scatterplot showed that drivers could not achieve high levels of productivity with low levels of safety consciousness.

However, a certain degree of safety consciousness might be required to handle risky and dangerous situations on the road more effectively and therefore quicker. We therefore expect that a certain minimum level of safety consciousness is necessary for truck drivers to be well-prepared to handle perilous situations they might encounter more effectively. To test this we complement our regression model with a Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), a technique to identify if necessary conditions exist in datasets (Dul, 2015). Following the stepwise approach described by Dul (2015), we executed an NCA to find out if a certain level of safety consciousness is required to achieve high productivity in our dataset. We found evidence that safety consciousness is necessary for productivity.

Publications:

De Vries, J. (2016). Behavioral Operations in Logistics. PhD thesis, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM). Chapter 6:  Which Drivers Should Transport Your Cargo? Empirical Evidence from Long-haul Transport. http://repub.eur.nl/pub/79705/