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Driver safety program template
Twelve sections a safety program is expected to cover, each with a line explaining what belongs in it and blank space for your own rules.
Why most of it is blank
A template that fills in your thresholds has decided your policy for you, and that document gets quoted back at you after an incident. So where a federal requirement exists it is cited, and everything else is left for you to write: your following distance, your reporting deadline, your consequence for a repeated event. The headings are the hard part to remember. The numbers are yours.
What the twelve sections cover
Purpose and scope, management commitment, driver qualification, orientation and training, hours of service, vehicle inspection and maintenance, safe driving rules, distracted driving and substances, crash and incident reporting, monitoring and coaching, recognition and consequences, and review.
The two requirements that are not optional
- Hours of service. For US property-carrying drivers, 49 CFR 395.3 sets 11 driving hours inside a 14 hour window after 10 consecutive hours off duty, a 30 minute interruption once 8 hours of driving have passed, and a 60 or 70 hour cycle. Your program may be stricter, never looser.
- Defect repair. Under 49 CFR 396.11(a)(3), a defect listed on a driver vehicle inspection report that would be likely to affect safe operation is repaired before the vehicle is operated again, and the repair is certified on the report.
Making it a program rather than a document
Name an owner. The section asking who owns safety, by name and role, is the one most often left blank, and a program nobody owns is reviewed by nobody.
Put recognition before consequences. A program that lists only penalties is read as a threat and followed as one, which produces hidden incidents rather than fewer.
Set a review date and a trigger. Once a year, plus after any serious incident or regulation change. Without a trigger the review slips until the document no longer matches how you run.
Have drivers sign it. The signature page is not bureaucracy: it is the difference between a rule you published and a rule a driver acknowledged.
Questions about safety programs
- Is a written safety program required?
- Not as a single document under the federal rules, though the underlying duties are required and some customers, insurers and bid processes ask to see a program. The practical reason to have one is that it is how the duties get followed consistently rather than remembered differently by each dispatcher.
- Does this cover Canada?
- The structure does; the citations do not. The two requirements cited are United States federal rules. Carriers in Canada follow Transport Canada and provincial rules, including different hours of service, so a Canadian carrier should keep the headings and replace the cited rules.
- How long should the finished program be?
- Short enough that a driver reads it. Most of the value is in a few specific rules with numbers in them, not in length. If a section does not apply to your operation, write that it does not apply rather than deleting it, so a reader can see it was considered.
- Who should review it before we use it?
- Someone who knows your jurisdiction and your insurance. This is a template, not legal advice and not a compliance guarantee: other requirements may apply to your operation, including drug and alcohol testing, driver qualification files and rules specific to hazardous materials or passenger transport.
- How does tracking fit into this?
- Mostly in the monitoring and coaching section. What you measure, how a driver sees their own results and what triggers a conversation are the parts that change behaviour, and they are far easier to run from recorded events than from the occasional ride-along.