Vision Zero Fleet Forum, Distracted Driving and More

Hi Friend,

As we officially head into spring here in North America, we are looking forward to new projects and new beginnings.

Later this month our most recent cohort of Fort Collins, CO-based FOCUS participants—including a non-profit food rescue and a hospital—kick off their fleet safety training courses. And Truck of the Future, our aftermarket solution to reduce blind spots for drivers, is now in the pilot phase with more implementations occurring in the U.S. and Mexico.

And as we gear up for our second annual Vision Zero Fleet Forum next month, later this week we’ll be attending and presenting at Concordia’s Lexington Summit which aims to advance civil discourse and understanding between different socio-economic groups in the U.S. (You can view an Instagram Live chat we did with Concordia here.)

Safer roads, as we all know, start with safer drivers and April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month. Learn more below about our plans this month.

As always, thank you for your support in doing what we can collectively to keep the world safe on our roads.

Vision Zero Fleet Forum - May 18-19

Join us at our second annual virtual Vision Zero Fleet Forum May 18-19. Create connections across industries and sectors to accelerate solutions for road safety, promote economic growth, and work towards Vision Zero.

Network with fleet operators, technology companies, OEMs, city officials, community advocates, and road safety experts from around the world.

Choose from sessions on topics such as:

* Advanced Tech
* Data Sharing
* Sustainability
* Fleet Safety
* Public-Private Partnerships
* Vehicle Design and more

Register today for #VZFF2022. And stay tuned because we hope one of our keynote speakers will be another high-ranking U.S. DOT official.

HAAS Alert’s Safety Cloud® Digital Alerts Launch in Apple Maps

Congratulations to long-time member HAAS Alert who announced late last month that their Safety Cloud®, the most comprehensive and trusted digital alerting platform for roadway safety, is now incorporated into real-time roadway hazard information in Apple Maps, one of the most widely used mapping, navigation, and traffic solutions in the world.

Drivers approaching emergency vehicles, incident responders, work zones, and other hazards on the road sourced by Safety Cloud® will receive an alert in Apple Maps, giving them advance warning of a potential safety issue ahead.

April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month

While Americans are driving less due to the pandemic, more than 40,000 people died in traffic crashes in 2020 — the largest projected number of fatalities since 2007 — with many of these attributed to distracted driving. We in the road safety industry know distracted driving is a public health epidemic and since April is distracted driving awareness month, it’s a perfect time to help educate the general public about this too.

Through our partnership with iHeart Media, we will look to run 15 and 30-second #JustDrive radio PSAs about the dangers of distracted driving. Additionally, we are in talks with them to run ads during some of their podcasts. If your organization has any distracted driving plans for April (and beyond), let us know and we can try to help promote them.

Implementing Vision Zero: Staying the Course, Evolving the Approach

On March 15th, TSR’s Executive Director, Noah Budnick, attended The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE)’s spring conference where he participated in a panel discussion called, Implementing Vision Zero: Staying the Course, Evolving the Approach.

The session addressed a few angles of the Vision Zero implementation challenges such as how to stay committed and focused when overnight success isn’t achieved, and how to pivot and incorporate new technologies, data, and approaches as they become available. View Noah’s slides from the presentation.

ITE has also agreed to make the recording of the session available for the next 60 days. (Please note, this is a TSR-specific link that will expire in 60 days. Please do not distribute it. Noah's presentation begins at 42:39 and he joins the Q&A at 1:07:00.)

And as you may remember ITE and TSR are working on a report to help transportation professionals use big data analytics for scoping, designing, implementing and assessing projects. The report, due out later this year, will:

Objectively define near miss data
Present the strengths and weaknesses of big data
Show how near miss data fills gaps in standard traffic safety data (i.e. fatalities and KSIs)
Use case studies to demonstrate how to work with near miss data analytics

Please let us know if you’re interested in having one of your case studies featured in this groundbreaking report that will be used internationally to help define near miss data.