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New Coalition Educates Drivers on Highway Safety

The American Trucking Associations, along with other highway safety groups, are bringing their expertise to “Our Roads, Our Safety,” a campaign focused on preventing highway fatalities.

To promote highway safety, the American Trucking Associations (ATA) is partnering with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the American Bus Association (ABA), and AAA to launch the “Our Roads, Our Safety” campaign.

The goal of the coalition is to reduce the number of highway fatalities by educating drivers about the need to share the road with commercial motor vehicles (CMVs), such as buses and trucks. To achieve that, the Our Roads, Our Safety is developing a series of safety videos, advertisements, infographics, and social media images to spread safety tips and reminders throughout the country. The first video discusses CMV blind spots and uses animation to highlight safe zones around a truck and reminds drivers to only pass commercial vehicles on the driver’s side.

“We are proud to work with ABA, AAA, and FMCSA to spread a common message that whether you are a truck driver, bus driver, or general motorist, we are all responsible for safely sharing our nation’s highways,” said ATA’s Executive Vice President of Industry Affairs and COO Elisabeth Barna in a press release.

While ATA has been active in promoting highway safety through its longstanding program, “Share the Road,” it seized the opportunity to join with other groups to amplify the message.

“It gives us another platform and more organization and bandwidth to continue spreading that message,” said Barna in an interview with Associations Now. “Anytime you can unify on an issue or, in this case, an education campaign, I think there’s just more power behind it.”

In joining this coalition, ATA brings its expertise of the trucking industry, including the 50 state trucking associations working to promote highway safety in schools. Barna emphasized the importance of shaping the campaign’s safety messages around the truck drivers who uphold highway safety in their day-to-day operations. “That is their workplace. The truck and the highway is their office,” she said.

Through this coalition, Barna also said ATA has been able to reach new audiences of highway users and that it will continue to look for opportunities to collaborate with any association that can help spread the message of highway safety. “I don’t think there’s ever too much education,” she said.

But before joining a coalition, Barna said associations should assess what they have to offer the partnership and what they aim to achieve by joining. Making sure an organization’s goals and priorities harmonize with the overarching vision is also important, she said. And while the approval process of getting each individual organization’s authorization before taking action can be considered challenging at times, Barna describes it as more of “an opportunity to spread the word.”

When it comes to Our Roads, Our Safety, Barna says the experience of working with other associations has been “exhilarating” because each group involved is passionate and dedicated to the cause of saving lives and improving their communities. “There are days when you are out there fighting the good fight, but when you’ve got other people along with you, it just makes it all that more special,” she said.

An image from the “Our Roads, Our Safety” campaign video. (YouTube screenshot)

Thorne McFarlane

By Thorne McFarlane

Thorne is an assistant editor for Associations Now and a literature buff who loves a great story. Have something interesting to share? Send it his way. MORE

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