Pumpers maneuvering the streets with a heavy liquid load and a high center of gravity stand to learn life-saving safety lessons from Harold Smith’s teachings. And gearing up for the 2009 busy season, it’s a good time for a refresher course based on tips from the safety guru behind the Smith System Driver Improvement Institute.
Jim Smith (no relation to Harold) trained under the founder of Dallas-based Smith System and currently serves as the safety training company’s vice president of training.
Harold Smith served in the military during World War II. When he came home to Detroit, Smith started a driver training school, where he soon developed the Five Keys of Space Cushion Driving. While these rules of the road will sound familiar to today’s drivers, Smith was the first person to put the safety tips down on paper, according to Jim Smith.
Harold Smith died in the 1980s. His company — now a holding of Transportation Resource Partners, whose managing director is legendary racer and team owner Roger Penske — has trained several generations of professional drivers on the finer points of collision avoidance. The approximately 110 Smith System trainers work with fleet trucking companies and independent drivers across many industries.
Pumper:
How did Harold Smith’s safety training take off?
Smith:
He found a fleet company in Detroit that was having a rash of collisions and offered to teach its drivers his program. If the drivers improved, they could pay him, if they didn’t learn anything, they didn’t have to pay. Ford Motor Co. heard of his success and hired him in 1952 to go out and train fleet buyers “how to keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down.” Then Ford gave him the company’s 50 millionth car off the assembly line and sent him on a cross-country safety tour.
Pumper:
Can you elaborate on Smith’s Five Keys of Space Cushion Driving?
Smith:
Aim high in steering means to look farther ahead than you would normally look. For thousands of years, humans walked through our environment and eyesight was formed for that purpose. In the last 100 years, the automobile has changed the speed we travel. But nobody’s really put any effort into helping us establish a new set of habits for our new speed. You should be looking 15 seconds ahead, a block in city driving and a quarter mile on the highway.
Get the big picture. We talk about your seeing distance, and we say you should allow 4 seconds of following space from the vehicle in front of you. And you need to build a 360-degree circle of awareness by checking your mirrors every five to eight seconds. That means a balanced check; you don’t need to check all the mirrors over that time, but one time look to the right mirror, then the center, then the left. There might be times when it’s more important to check one of them frequently, or all of them.
Keep your eyes moving. Never focus on the same thing for more than two seconds. We talk about the different types of vision, peripheral and central. Peripheral vision is about 180 degrees of fuzzy vision. Central vision is three degrees of clear sharp vision used to gather information and detail. The problems come when you have a fixed stare, and you lock the central vision on one thing for two seconds or more and your eyes are no longer moving. Lock it in too long and you start to lose the edge of your peripheral vision. Another problem is the blank stare, when you’re using nothing but peripheral vision. You’re picking up the light, color and motion, but not the detail. You’re looking, but not seeing, and then you become vulnerable.
Leave yourself an out. Harold Smith said if you surround yourself with space instead of vehicles, it will be hard for you to have an accident. If other drivers can’t get close to you, they can’t hurt you, and if you screw up there’s no one there to hit you. The only space you have a chance of controlling is in front of you. You can’t control the space behind you and you may have the sides blocked.
If you sit in a parking lot and watch traffic for 10 seconds, you’ll see traffic travels in clusters. We’re comfortable in clusters; we tribe up. It’s an unconscious thing. But we don’t want drivers to travel in the pack. We don’t want to be where people are, but where people aren’t. Try to put yourself between those clusters.
Make sure they see you. You want to be proactive rather than reactive to keep that driver making an idiot move from forcing you to adjust at the last second. I try to encourage people to run with their lights on and make themselves as visible as possible. Look for eye contact with other drivers. If I don’t see somebody looking my way, I assume they may pull out in front of me. I might have to tap on my horn to keep them from making a move that will cause a collision.
Pumper:
About gadgets and gizmos in trucks, you once wrote, “There is no shortcut in trying to improve safety performance.’’ What did you mean?
Smith:
It’s amazing how much money we spend making vehicles safer in crashes, but how little time we spend teaching drivers how to avoid them. We have crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, electronic stabilization and lots of other things working for us, but we’re spending little time on the other side of the issue. We still need to do the basic things to keep us safe and sane behind the wheel. There are a number of technologies evolving, and I believe as they become more refined, they will eventually help drivers … but even if we can eventually count 100 percent on the electronic inputs we receive, it’s only going to give us some protection, not complete protection.
Pumper:
Part of what you promote is breaking poor driving habits. What driver factor is causing the most problems these days?
Smith:
News attention now is focused on driver distraction, everything from cell phones to radios to conversation. I can’t even text when I’m sitting still, let alone going down the road. And one of the most dangerous things is dropping food and drinks. Sometimes we have a tendency to reach down for something, and it’s never a good outlook when you get your head below the dashboard.
Pumper:
Why should pumping companies make further driver training a priority?
Smith:
If there’s ever a contractor who should practice aiming high in steering and seeing the big picture, this is it. All the moves you make with a heavy liquid load are moves you want to make gradually and early, including adjusting speed and direction. When you see skid marks on a highway cloverleaf, the problem is a load wanted to keep going when the driver wanted to turn up the road.
Pumper:
How can small liquid waste companies or individual drivers best utilize the Smith System training?
Smith:
There are two ways. The first is taking the online training, which gives them the basics of the five keys and testing to check comprehension. Or they can take the one-day Driver Direct training, which gives them the behind-the-wheel lab work. Driver Direct includes two hours of classroom work and the rest is behind-the-wheel, typically with four or five students taking turns driving and an instructor teaching the Smith System methods. The real learning happens behind the wheel.
Jim Smith is vice president of training for Dallas-based Smith System Driver Improvement Institute. To contact him or learn more about the driver training programs, go to www.smith-system.com.
