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 for 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 doesn’t reduce unintentional errors8 due to lack of knowledge or skill.

For skill-based errors, training and education are necessary and should be considered an extension of a strong safety culture. However, as mentioned earlier, not all training is equal, especially when it comes to not just increasing knowledge but actually impacting real-world driving behaviors. The following are some evidence-backed recommendations6 for training that results in positive impacts on driving behavior.

• Do a needs assessment first. What factors are contributing to accidents in your fleet? Speeding? Fatigue? Decision errors?  This step would call for investigating company crash records, examining telematics data, and conducting interviews with drivers concerning critical driving incidents. These interviews could focus on the circumstances of the incident, what the driver did that was ineffective or ineffective, and what were the consequences of the driver’s actions. Also, it may be helpful at this step to consult relevant external sources and reports such as those produced by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program or the NHTSA.
• Gauge drivers’ attitudes, beliefs, and self-perceived behaviors. This can be done via surveys and performance reviews. This addresses the psychological component, which is equally important, in addition to the technical needs component. For example, if the motivation to learn is low, the training would need to be adjusted to account for that by using less lectures and more engaging formats such as scenario-based training (SBT) led by veteran drivers rather than instructors who are not drivers themselves.
• Break up the training. Distribute it across a longer period of time with shorter courses (e.g., 1 day courses over the course of a few years) instead of providing it as one concentrated mass (e.g., a single 5-day course).
  
• Integrate multiple modalities of learning. Make the training more of a blended learning experience (e.g., mobile learning, face-to-face learning, VR technology), which makes it more engaging.
  
• Don’t end with the training itself. Evaluate and boost knowledge retention and the applying of knowledge into behavior through monitoring and feedback. This can be done with periodic coaching, follow-up performance reviews, and ongoing tracking of telematics data to ensure that the training is having the desired impacts.

Finally, radio or computer-based communication can certainly be a part of an overall safety protocol, but it should be done in a way that actually facilitates safety and doesn’t unwittingly add risk7 due to drivers becoming distracted. A good first step would be to have dispatch leadership understand the daily experience of drivers through occasional ride-alongs and other types of reminders (e.g., a visual checklist that the dispatcher can see at all times).

Next, there should be a clear, shared understanding that safety is always paramount and that drivers are allowed the flexibility to exercise judgement about how and when to respond. This can mean waiting for a safe moment or to pull over before responding. Similarly, there should be the additional shared understanding that safety is to be prioritized over faster deliveries. It’s important for everyone to remember that unless safety is prioritized, the deliveries might not get to their destinations at all.

Whether it’s delivering food, medical supplies, construction materials, or the many other products and goods in transit on a daily basis, lone professional drivers are a critical part of the infrastructure that keeps organizations, and the industries and communities they serve, functioning. Keeping these drivers safe is not just a matter of adding more training or increasing safety communication but adding the right kinds of training and practicing communication in a way that adds safety and doesn’t stress or distract drivers. Protecting the safety of drivers in this way isn’t just an ethical obligation. It is a strategic investment in operational stability, worker retention, and overall organizational resilience.

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