A Time-Series Analysis of Motor Carrier Safety Behaviors

Abstract

Multiple stakeholders are impacted by motor carrier operating safety, including truck drivers, motor carriers, insurance companies, shippers, and the general public. I develop and test theory in this article about motor carriers' longitudinal performance on three categories of safety behaviors associated with accident rates—Unsafe Driving, Hours-of-Service Compliance, and Vehicle Maintenance—as tracked by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration as part of the Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) program. I specifically draw on fundamental concepts from sociological agency theory and resource dependency theory to develop a middle-range theory that generates previously untested hypotheses about carriers' longitudinal safety performance for these classes of safety behaviors following the CSA program's inception. The hypotheses are investigated by fitting a series of multivariate latent curve models to four years of panel data for 484 big for-hire vehicle carriers operating in the United States. The empirical findings confirm the theoretical expectations and persist during robustness testing. These findings have significant consequences for academics, motor carrier executives, purchasers of motor carrier transportation services, and policymakers.