Distraction and Drowsiness in Motorcoach Drivers

Hammond, Rebecca, L.; Hanowski, Richard J.; Miller, Andrew; Soccolich, Susan; Farrell, Laura J. · 2016 · ROSA P / United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Office of Analysis, Research, and Technology

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Summary

This study addresses the lack of empirical research on motorcoach operations, specifically investigating the roles of driver distraction and drowsiness in safety-critical events. While motorcoach crashes often result in multiple injuries and fatalities at rates higher than those of large trucks, prior data on these specific risk factors was limited. The research aimed to characterize the types of tasks motorcoach drivers engage in prior to safety incidents and assess the associated risks, providing a baseline for understanding commercial bus safety. The researchers analyzed naturalistic driving data collected from two motorcoach fleets (one airport shuttle service in California and one tour operator in Texas) between May 2013 and July 2014. The dataset comprised approximately 600,000 miles of driving from 43 instrumented vehicles and 65 drivers. Data acquisition systems recorded continuous video from five cameras and kinematic data. The analysis focused on 1,086 valid safety-critical events (SCEs), including 17 crashes, compared against 4,600 baseline epochs of normative driving. The study employed odds ratios and population attributable risk calculations to evaluate four key areas: secondary and driving-related task engagement, environmental conditions, eye glance patterns, and observer-rated drowsiness. The results identified specific high-risk tasks for motorcoach drivers. The tasks with the highest odds ratios for involvement in an SCE were reaching for an object, external distractions, and the use of the intercom system, the latter being a novel distraction specific to this vehicle class. In contrast to distraction, drowsiness was rarely a factor; very few SCEs were coded with high levels of drowsiness. Eye glance analysis further quantified risk, showing that eyes-off-forward-roadway time significantly affected safety. The study also examined how environmental factors such as lighting, weather, and traffic density interacted with task engagement to influence crash likelihood. The significance of this work lies in its provision of the first comprehensive naturalistic data on motorcoach driver behavior, filling a critical gap in commercial motor vehicle safety research. By identifying intercom use and object reaching as primary distractions, the findings offer specific targets for safety interventions and training programs. The study concludes that while distraction is a major contributor to motorcoach safety-critical events, drowsiness is less prevalent than in other commercial driving contexts. These insights support the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s mission to reduce crashes and provide a foundation for future domain-specific investigations into bus operations.

Key finding

Task types with the highest risk for safety-critical events were reaching for an object, external distractions, and intercom use, while high drowsiness was rarely observed in safety-critical events.

Methodology

naturalistic

Sample size: 65

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• temporal
• visual
• external distraction
• distraction detection algorithms
• manual
• bus coach

Information type

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• Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data, observational prevalence, physiological data