Evaluating motor carrier safety processes using data envelopment analysis

The general paradigm guiding research on motor carrier safety has evolved to include the construct of compliance with societal safety norms. Compliance's presence in the paradigm involves it in relationships between a carrier's safety management processes and its safety performance. While recent studies addressed the relationship between compliance and safety performance, the relationship between the safety management process and carrier compliance has been largely ignored. The research presented here examines that relationship by developing a comprehensive model of motor carrier safety that explicitly considers the role of compliance, and by empirically assessing the state of compliance in the motor carrier industry.;The theoretical model states motor carrier safety as a process of optimization, that involves using safety inputs to generate safety outputs for the purposes of achieving a safety objective. Safety inputs are introduced as defined concepts corresponding to safety management that are grouped under the general areas of driver management and vehicle management. These areas focus on activities that prepare drivers and vehicles to operate without errors and defects, respectively. Safety outputs are defined as driver and vehicle performance and reflect the extent to which carrier drivers and vehicles comply with societal safety norms. A carrier's safety objective is to optimize safety performance, which is defined as minimizing the degree of physical risk a carrier generates in a given time period. Formal relationships between safety inputs and safety output, safety outputs and safety objective, and safety inputs and safety objective are defined as compliance efficiency, safety effectiveness and safety technical effectiveness, respectively.;The empirical aspect of the research demonstrates how data envelopment analysis might be used to evaluate how efficiently a carrier converts safety inputs into safety outputs. Using recently developed safety compliance data, data envelopment analysis is employed to obtain rankings and scores of relative compliance efficiency for a 93 Class I and Class II general freight carriers. The results form the basis for discussion of how DEA can be used to identify carrier safety process deficiencies and as a benchmark to monitor improvements in their safety processes.