Twenty Years Behind the Wheel — Why Driver Working Conditions Must Be Treated as a Safety Issue
I recently came across a piece of research that stopped me in my tracks. Not because it was new. Quite the opposite. The research, Stress, Fatigue, Health, and Risk of Road Traffic Accidents Among Professional Drivers: The Contribution of Physical Inactivity , was written by Adrian H. Taylor and Lisa Dorn and published in the Annual Review of Public Health in 2006. Read the original Taylor and Dorn research – Annual Review of Public Health That date immediately caught my attention. 2006 is the year I started driving buses. I've now reached 20 years as a bus driver . So here I was, two decades into my own career, reading research published at roughly the point that career began — and recognising many of the issues frontline bus drivers are still talking about today. Timetable pressure. Fatigue. Long working hours. Stress. Recovery. The effect working conditions can have on the person responsible for safely controlling a large passenger vehicle. It left me with a fai...