2016 Commercial Vehicle Safety Research Summit: Best Practices for Advancing Safety through Partnerships with Universities

 

UMassSafe releases the summary report for the 2016 Commercial Vehicle Safety Research Summit: Best Practices for Advancing Safety through Partnerships with Universities. This report outlines the content of all the presentations. Access the full report here.

The 2016 Commercial Vehicle Safety Research Summit: Best Practices for Advancing Safety through Partnerships with Universities (referred to hereafter as CV Summit), was conceived and implemented to promote partnerships between universities, law enforcement, and drivers licensing agencies. With the goal of promoting the sharing of best practices across these disciplines, in order to improve commercial motor vehicle (CMV) and commercial driver’s license (CDL) enforcement and licensing compliance in the Eastern Service Center (ESC) area, the CV Summit drew more than 130 attendees representing all 16 ESC states as well as a variety of other agencies and organizations. The University of Massachusetts Traffic Safety Research Program (UMassSafe) received a grant from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), in part, to plan, pilot, and host the CV Summit.

FMCSA Deputy Administrator and Summit Keynote Speaker, Daphne Jefferson summed up the purpose of the CV Summit, as she addressed the full group in the first session. She said, “For us at FMCSA, safety is our middle name. It’s in our DNA. It’s at the forefront of what we do. As we automate, as we innovate, we have to think in terms of safety, and what that will mean for the future… The work you do over the next couple of days will help us inform how we move forward on the safety mission. And we always have to keep that in mind, because ultimately, that’s why we’re here.”

Taking this message one-step further, Anne Ferro, a Keynote Speaker and President/CEO of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) stated, “…We’re all under constrained resources. We’re all under constrained time. We can’t implement all of these tactics and all of these tools and all of these topics at one time. So that’s why this collaborative piece, of bringing everybody’s interests together, and making sure we’re using the tools available, is so important.”

The CV Summit was considered the first step in what will likely become a larger movement toward the promotion of partnerships between a wide variety of transportation safety stakeholders. During the CV Summit, participants came together as a team to share best practices across disciplines, compare successes and challenges, and to plan next steps to promote and expand partnerships. Today, a variety of emerging trends and issues exist that are brand new to the field of transportation safety. Gathering as a group, participants of the CV Summit sought to gain a more comprehensive understanding of these trends, looking at each from a variety of different angles and through the unique lens of different agencies and organizations.