SAFETY IS IN OUR CULTURE

Next week, July 12-18, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s (CVSA) Operation Safe Driver Week is proceeding as scheduled and throughout North America enforcement officers will be on the road ensuring safe driving is being practiced. This year the week-long safety initiative’s focus is on speeding. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been spending more time at home and with less drivers on the road the temptation to speed up a little bit is prevalent.  Motorists engaging in unsafe driving can be pulled over and given a warning or citation.

Ensuring safety is a major aspect of the trucking industry and here at Erb Transport, we are committed to going the extra mile to ensure our drivers are being safe on the road. Safety is built into our corporate culture and we are proud to have many initiatives and programs in place to ensure our drivers are safe while sharing the road with other motorists. We believe our continued success and continuous improvement establish us as an industry leader in safety. We have received numerous safety awards, including the TCAs (Truckload Carrier’s Association) Fleet Safety Award for the second time this year! For our complete list of awards click ici.

There are a number of programs that are in place at Erb to recognize and reward our drivers for accident-free driving, years of service and safe driving. The safe driving program called Pro-Drive Program. This is a driver performance monitoring and reward program. EOBRs (electronic on-board recorders), in conjunction with DriveCam recorders, are used to measure the driver’s speed, hard-braking, idle time, routing, mileage and behavioural driving traits. These measures are benchmarked according to company and industry best practice standards. The goal is to reduce a driver’s accident risk, create financial savings and reward a driver based on their high performance. Annual recognition is given to top performing drivers, owner-operators and terminals. Every year we are proud that we get to recognize so many of our drivers for their safe driving!

In 2017, Erb began installing DriveCam event recorders in all our trucks. These cameras will sense any erratic movement of the truck and record all events from eight seconds before and four seconds after the movement has stopped. The cameras will show us analytics and identify trends and behaviors of our drivers on the road. This is a way for us to not only protect our employees, but also coach them throughout their driving career and prevent accidents. These drivecams are a proactive step in ensuring the safety of our drivers, products, and others on the road.

These are just a few of the many safety initiatives we have in place here at Erb. By providing our employees with the proper tools, communication, training, and recognition is the key to safety success.  We can all work together and continue to keep our roads safe.

Operation Safe Driver Week reminds us all to slow down and that safety should always be our top priority. Getting to our destination a few minutes earlier is not worth the risk. Safety and Compliance Director Tom Boehler tells our drivers: “Don’t let your guard down by taking risks, one small event could change the rest of their life, I’ve seen it happen!”  It is important that at the end of the day, we all get home safely. Let’s all do our part and share the road, limit distractions and help keep our roads safe.