There are many conditions that can make driving extremely risky including poor visibility, slippery roads and heavy traffic.

A Driver’s personal condition when affected by fatigue, illness or stress can also lead to high risk and even unsafe driving.

These types of conditions are what we call adverse driving conditions. Professional Drivers must be skilled and knowledgeable to detect conditions like these in a timely manner and to make responsible decisions in the interest of safety.

Bison Transport’s Right to Decide (RTD) policy expects Drivers to make decisions that ensure they always make it home safely after each and every trip. Drivers have the responsibility to choose to suspend travel temporarily if they deem conditions to be unsafe. These decisions may include wearing proper safety gear to prevent injuries, using safe dock procedures, adjusting speed to conditions, increasing following distance, getting enough rest, taking a break when needed or even waiting out a storm in a safe place.

Each fall, we prepare a course that is mandatory education for our professional Drivers and Fleet teams (Dispatch). The course is available to our staff both online or in a classroom version as part of our Driver Development program.

Our goal with this course is to emphasize that when Drivers recognize any conditions that increase the risk to an unsafe level, they need to react immediately by making decisions that will reduce the risk.

Our RTD policy not only empowers Drivers to make choices in the interest of safety, it makes it their responsibility. Drivers making the correct decisions to reduce risk will in turn reduce collisions, injury and property or equipment damage. As part of this course, we also created a series of short videos that emphasize different scenarios in which a Driver may need to use our RTD policy.

We are happy to share the first 4 of 5 Right To Decide videos. They focus on fatigue, adverse weather conditions, equipment, and driver conditions, from a driver's perspective. Please click to watch below.

Check in with us next month for the next installment in the Right To Decide video series!

We hope you will share this post with friends and family. All drivers should understand that safety is up to them and making the right decision is their responsibility.

Remember, you're in the driver seat.