Presentation
Unraveling Impactful Contributors to Safety-Critical Commuting Events
SessionLBR2: Late-Breaking Results
DescriptionCommuting by car is a frequent activity that poses a substantial risk to worker safety (Chrion et al., 2008; Elfering et al., 2013). Recent work establishes that unsafe commuting is driven not just by demands in the commuting environment, but also by the spillover of reactions to workday demands to the commuting environment (Calderwood & Mitropoulos, 2019). We sought to establish commuter inattention, distraction, and fatigue as key contributors to safety-critical commuting events (e.g., crashes, near crashes, and crash-relevant conflicts; Dingus et al., 2016), with attention to how workday demands alter these commuter states. Ninety-four (N = 94) commuters participated in an eight-week study (encompassing over 6,000 individual commuting trips) synthesizing aspects of experience sampling (twice daily surveys before the pre- and post-work commutes) and naturalistic driving (installation of in-vehicle kinematic and video-recording equipment tracking driving and driver behaviors across all driving trips) study designs. Safety-critical commuting events have been identified using validated algorithms based on vehicle kinematic data, which have been subsequently coded using video data for indicators of driver inattention, distraction, and fatigue. Indicators of potential driver distraction and inattention were implicated in 33.3% and 47.6% of safety-critical commuting events identified to date. However, obvious signs of commuter fatigue were not identified in safety-critical commuting events identified to date. Daily survey results suggest that encountering frustrating hindrance demands at work co-varies with lower attention, higher distraction, and greater fatigue, suggesting that this type of work demand may be particularly relevant to worker safety while commuting.
Event Type
Late Breaking Results
TimeWednesday, September 11th3:20pm - 3:30pm MST
LocationFLW Salon B