Rethinking Safety for Lone Professional Drivers

Lone professional drivers face unique workplace risks. Research shows how safety culture, targeted training and safer communication practices can reduce crashes and improve driver safety outcomes.

• By Michael Burke
• Apr 27, 2026

When it comes to occupational safety, lone professional drivers are in a zone somewhere between on-site employees and other types of professional drivers, such as rideshare drivers. On-site employees are covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) and its regulations for reducing workplace hazards, and employers are expected to comply with these regulations. Rideshare drivers, however, are independent contractors and their safety therefore, tends to get framed not as one of workplace safety but of road safety and individual driver responsibility.

Meanwhile, lone professional drivers are employees and also covered under various workplace safety regulations, just like with on-site employees. Yet because they are on the road and not physically present in a facility, their unique safety needs can sometimes go unrecognized or addressed in ways that aren’t optimal. Given how critical lone professional drivers are to organizations and to society as a whole, improving their safety requires that we understand what the challenges are and then apply evidence-backed approaches that work.

Professional Drivers Face Disproportionate Risks

Lone professional drivers are among the highest-risk occupational groups in the U.S., and transportation accidents are the leading cause of work-related deaths. In 2022, for example, of the 39,221 fatal crashes on U.S. roads, at least one large truck or bus was involved in 5,476 of them. There were, furthermore, 548,000 non-fatal crashes involving at least one large truck or bus.

Accidents are costly in numerous ways. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the estimated economic cost from road accidents involving large trucks and buses every year is in the range of $143-152 billion. Fatal crashes account for the majority of those costs, but non-fatal accidents are costly too, increasing workers’ compensation costs, higher insurance costs, and lost productivity due to time away from work.

Conditions that increase the chances of accidents, such as stress, long hours, and poor safety culture, can also contribute to the high turnover rates among truck drivers, which are costly in themselves.

The Multi-Faceted Nature of Drivers’ Safety

The foundation for ensuring a safer working environment for lone professional drivers is a strong safety culture. This can be broadly defined as the culturally reinforced values, beliefs, practices and norms within an organization regarding worker safety. Research shows that a positive safety culture correlates with less risky driving behaviors, which lowers the likelihood of accidents and fewer days of work lost due to injuries. Additional benefits include higher work engagement and work satisfaction, which in themselves also positively influence safer driving behavior. Another bonus of having a strong safety culture is higher retention levels among truck drivers in an industry known for its turnover rate.

While a positive safety culture is associated with these positive outcomes, it is not enough on its own. Even with a strong safety culture, companies can engage in safety-related practices that don’t produce the desired positive results and even unwittingly increase the risks for drivers. An example of the former is road safety training that is unengaging and less effective due to various factors such as being overly generalized, relying too much on lectures without practical and interactive components, or using one-off approaches without any follow-ups. Such types of training may increase knowledge but not necessarily affect real-world driving behaviors.

Next, increasing safety-related communication via radio or computer between drivers and dispatch leadership about road conditions and adverse road-related events seems like a practice that would increase safety. But, counterintuitively, this isn’t necessarily so, and it can even have detrimental impacts due to drivers becoming distracted. This especially tends to happen if updates or reports are frequent, require the drivers to respond promptly and don’t allow drivers the flexibility to pull over to respond. Part of the underlying issue here is that dispatch leadership often isn’t aware of the day-to-day lived reality of drivers, resulting in communication behaviors that, while intended to help, can have the opposite effect.

Best Practices for Keeping Drivers Safe

Fortunately, the research provides insights into not just what doesn’t work to improve safety (e.g., unsafe communication practices) but also for what does work. For example, while a positive safety culture can contribute to safer driving behavior in general, and it helps reduce deliberate violations, it

This article originally appeared in the April/May 2026 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.