About the Program

Did you know? Over 75% of crashes and near-crashes involving heavy vehicles are primarily caused by car drivers! Clearly, we have a problem here that needs to be addressed.

The Sharing the Road with Large Trucks program was developed by a team of large truck safety experts from VTTI. The creation of this outreach program was in response to research performed by VTTI's Division of Freight, Transit, & Heavy Vehicle Safety that found car drivers initiated 78% of incidents involving heavy trucks. Increasing car driver knowledge and training on how to safely interact with large trucks on our roadways can reduce these incidents. This program reaches thousands of individuals across the country each year.

While this website was originally intended for young drivers obtaining their driver's license for the first time, all drivers can benefit from reviewing the material and scenarios to ensure they are sharing the road with large trucks properly in their everyday driving.

Many of the video clips shown on this website are taken from real-world driving events that occurred during a naturalistic driving study conducted by VTTI. Truck drivers were recruited to participate in the study, with cameras and sensors recording their day-to-day driving activities and interactions.

Some video clips were produced on the Virginia Smart Roads test track located at VTTI. The screenshots, from VTTI's Commercial Training and Prototyping Simulator, provide over-head images to give the entire perspective of a driving conflict unfolding. This enables researchers to provide examples of scenarios that couldn't be supplied by the naturalistic driving study.