Center for Truck and Bus Safety

specializes in providing high quality education and research focusing on a variety of safety issues involving heavy truck and bus operations.

The aim of the center is to conduct research that advances the state of knowledge in the truck and bus safety domain and provides pragmatic solutions to real-world problems. The vision of the Center is to be a worldwide leader in truck and bus safety research.

CTBS, led by Rich Hanowski, Ph.D, is comprised of three groups specializing in the following areas: The Advanced Systems and Applications (A.S.A.) Group, The Behavioral Analysis and Applications (B.A.A.) Group, The Safety and Human Factors Engineering (S.H.F.E.) Group.

Current CTBS Projects

Rural Truck Crashes: Linking Carrier Descriptive Attributes to Crash Patterns – An Untapped Tool in State Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Programs

Alejandra Medina, Tammy Trimble

This project, awarded by the Virginia Departments of Motor Vehicles and Transportation, began in November 2010. Over 70% of all fatal CMV crashes involve CUTs. Of these, 25% occur on Interstate highways with the remaining 75% occurring on U.S. state routes and other highways. However, the majority of federal and state safety intervention activities and data collection efforts focus on Interstate highways. Working jointly with the Institute for Transportation Research and Education at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Department of Transportation, the research team is working to provide a profile of the types of combination unit truck carrier operations involved in fatal crashes on non-Interstate roadways. This research will inform federal and state CMV safety efforts that seek to develop better enforcement and regulatory oversight over the full range of CMV operations.

Vehicle Width Measurement Technology: Vehicle-Width Measurement Technology Development: Phase 1

Darrell Bowman, Andy Schaudt

This project, awarded by the Virginia Center for Transportation Innovation and Research (VCTIR), began December 1, 2010. The focus of this project is to develop a vehicle-width measuring and alerting system to reduce over-with vehicle violations at Virginia Department of Transportation work zones. The over-width vehicle violations often result in traffic congestion and work disruptions while the offending vehicle is being turned around or re-routed by law enforcement officers. The objective of this project is to explore existing systems and potential technologies that are able to successfully measure vehicle widths at highway speeds while remaining cost effective and portable, in addition to developing appropriate warning systems.

CDIDS: Case-Control Commercial Driver Individual Differences Study

Rich Hanowski, Jeff Hickman, Erin Mabry

The objective of the Case-Control Commercial Driver Individual Differences Study (CDIDS) is to examine a wide array of driver and situational factors and determine the prevalence of these factors as well as their relationship to being involved in a crash. The goal of the CDIDS is to identify and prioritize commercial driver individual differences with respect to risk factors. Primarily, these risk factors will consist of personal factors such as demographic characteristics, medical conditions, personality traits, personal attitudes, and behavioral history; however, they will also include work environmental conditions, such as carrier operations type and compensation method. The proposed study will identify risk factors by linking the characteristics of individual drivers with their driving records during the duration of the study, especially the occurrence or absence of safety-related events, including preventable crashes, crashes regardless of preventability, moving violations, and vehicle inspection violations.

Pinhole Leak: Nurse Tank: Testing and Recommended Best Practices for Nurse Tank Safety

Alan Russell, Iowa State University

This project, awarded by the FMCSA, is a sub-award being conducted by Iowa State University. Phase II of the Nurse Tank Safety Project contains four tasks. Task One is to acquire five nurse tanks with pinhole leaks to examine the pinhole site by angle-beam ultrasound, fluorescent particle inspection, neutron diffraction residual stress analysis, and metallographic sectioning. The goals of Task One are to determine whether pinhole leaks have the potential to lead to catastrophic tank failure, to determine the root cause of the pinhole failures, and to recommend best practices to prevent pinhole leaks from occurring in the future and to determine when tanks with such leaks should be taken out of service for safety reasons. Task Two will measure stress corrosion cracking rates in nurse tank steel under three conditions: normal ammonia, ammonia containing N-Serve additive, and normal ammonia in an unpurged tank. These data will be used to generate crack growth rates for various ammonia conditions. Task Three will measure residual stress near welds in a nurse tank that was given a stress relief anneal after welding; this will be compared with data taken in phase I on nurse tanks that had not received a stress-relief anneal to see if annealing during manufacture might prevent SCC in nurse tanks. Task Four will use angle-beam ultrasound to measure crack numbers, sizes, orientations, and locations on a representative sample of nurse tanks of varying ages to determine if cracks tend to form and grow in specific sections near tank welds or whether they are distributed randomly around the tank's welds.

Fatigue Management Program: The Development of Guidelines and Materials to Enable Motor Carriers to Implement a Fatigue Management Program

Rich Hanowski, Jeff Hickman

Historically, commercial carriers, regulators and commercial vehicle drivers have responded to this issue by working/driving within prescribed hours of service (HOS) rules. A recent body of research in fatigue management indicates that other factors are involved in driver fatigue, and that there is no one simple solution available to mitigate commercial driver fatigue and safety performance. There is sufficient knowledge now to allow for the development of a "guide to motor carriers" on the design and implementation of a Fatigue Management Program (FMP) into ongoing carrier operations. This project will develop an FMP as series of modules, each covering required topics and directed toward specific audiences.

FAST DASH: FMCSA's Advanced System Testing using a Data Acquisition System on the Highway

Rich Hanowski, Darrell Bowman

The safety objective of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is to save lives and reduce injuries by preventing and minimizing the severity of truck and bus crashes (FMCSA, 2010). According to the FMCSA, the development, evaluation, and deployment of advanced safety technology will be a key to realizing this objective.Read More

STSCE Light-Vehicle Ed Survey: A Survey of U.S. Light-Vehicle Driver Education Programs

Andy Schaudt

The purpose of this project is to survey curricula of light-vehicle driver education/improvement programs and assess any information that is relevant to heavy-vehicle characteristics and procedures for sharing the road. Recent research investigated light-vehicle/heavy–vehicle near–crashes and crashes (critical incidents) and found that 78 percent were initiated by the light–vehicle driver (Hanowski et al., 2007). The most common incident type involved the light vehicle changing lanes without sufficient gap to the heavy vehicle. This larger proportion of light–vehicle at–fault incidents may result from inadequate training in heavy–vehicle dynamics during light-vehicle driver education/improvement programs. Light–vehicle driver education/improvement programs that contain content about heavy-vehicle operation may be helpful in reducing light–vehicle/heavy–vehicle interactions. However, it is unclear as to the extent of current state curriculum requirements and content (for both public and private programs) regarding heavy-vehicle operation and associated light-vehicle driving recommended procedures. Read More

OBMS FOT: Onboard Monitoring System (OBMS) Field Operational Test (FOT)

Myra Blanco

This project was awarded by the FMCSA. The objective of this project is to determine whether an onboard monitoring system (OBMS) will reduce at-risk behavior among commercial drivers and improve driver safety performance. Specifically, the project will determine if recording and reporting of safety-critical events followed by coaching the driver (by safety managers) using these safety events as feedback will enhance safe driving behavior. This system will also contain an electronic onboard recorder (EOBR) that will be evaluated. Read More

Commercial Motor Vehicle Driving Simulator Validation ("SimVal") Study Phase II

Myra Blanco

The "SimVal" study is testing the effectiveness of a tractor–trailer training simulator for purposes of commercial motor vehicle entry–level driver training. The study is also assessing the potential use of simulators in licensing of commercial drivers. In addition, a showcase of advanced simulator capabilities is being conducted. This showcase assesses extreme driving conditions and emergency maneuvers along with different vehicle cargo/load configurations, i.e., van, doubles, and tankers. This project is in support of the CMV driver safety program of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). Download project sheet (PDF)

Driver Distraction in Commercial Vehicle Operations

Rebecca Olson

This 21-month project is funded by FMCSA and began in July 2007. This analysis project is using data from two recently completely large-scale naturalistic data collection studies, the Drowsy Driver Warning System Field Operational Test (DDWS FOT) study and the Naturalistic Truck Driving Study (NTDS).

The purpose of the current study is to analyze drowsy-related and distraction-related safety-critical events (i.e., crashes and near-crashes) collected during the DDWS FOT and the NTDS, in addition to 20,000 baseline events (i.e., normal driving). Each safety-critical event and baseline event will be analyzed for driver eye position prior to the event to determine the presence of driver inattention.

The analysis conducted on this data will follow that of the 100-Car Study and will investigate the types and frequencies of distractions in which drivers engage, environmental conditions associated with these distractions, and the effects of eyes-off-forward-roadway on driving performance. This project is expected to end in April 2009.

Factors that Affect the Service Life of Cargo Tanks.

Darrell Bowman

This 18-month project, awarded by FMCSA, began in January 2008. The Cargo Tank Service Life project will study the factors that affect the service life of cargo tanks. Researchers will study singular events (e.g., one-time occurrence of an over pressurization, a rollover, and an improper repair), recurring events (e.g., repeated occurrences of chemical reactions leading to degraded material, improper inspection/testing procedures, and repeated over-pressurization of the vessel), and multiple events (e.g., the interaction of more than one event such as the cyclic loading on the vessel and support structure caused by over-the-road travel). The overall goals of the project are to increase awareness of factors that affect service life of cargo tanks, and improve industry practices and procedures for testing, inspections and repairs of cargo tanks.

Field Demonstration of an Advanced Heavy Vehicle Indirect Visibility

Greg Fitch

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association (FMCSA) are funding this project to evaluate whether the concept of providing drivers with enhanced visional information results in improved situational awareness and leads to a reduction in safety critical incidents caused by poor visibility (e.g., scenarios such as vehicles in blind spots, vehicles obscured by bad weather conditions, and vehicles obscured by poor lighting). Both a commercially available Indirect Visibility System (IVS) as well as an enhanced IVS that meets the performance specifications developed by previous VTTI research will be installed on six trucks that operate in a revenue-producing environment. Drivers' lane-change behavior both with and without the IVS will be analyzed. The safety benefits that an IVS may provide will be assessed by analyzing the conditions that exist when lane changes are made, as well as how close the tractor-trailer gets to surrounding traffic when changing lanes. The project is expected to be completed by August, 2010.