After five years behind the wheel, safe driving became second nature.
When I returned from layoff last year, all of the brown package cars in my UPS facility had been outfitted with a new piece of equipment: AI-powered dashboard cameras.
If I recall correctly, we were told that these front-facing cameras were always on, even when the vehicle itself was turned off.
Always on, and always recording. As it was explained to us, a continuous stream of video footage was being fed back to the third-party vendor, Lytx.
This is a massive surveillance project. It’s not like airport T.S.A. lines, where people pass through one at a time. It’s 100,000 package cars on the road all day, every day, all at once.
There aren’t enough human eyeballs to handle a project of this magnitude for any sustained period. The work would quickly collapse under its own weight.
That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.
All those Lytx streams are being fed to smart machines, which are trained to look not only for actual incidents – i.e., crashes – but also near-misses.
While video evidence of crashes ostensibly helps UPS manage risk and reduce exposure, the near-misses ostensibly offer opportunities for driver feedback.
AI flags something as a near-miss. From there, some or all of those clips pass through however many layers of human review before one makes it back to the on-road supervisor, who sits down with the driver for a coachable moment.
I still remember the first time I was called into the office before the start of my shift to review Lytx footage. My heart started beating out of my chest. I was convinced that the all-seeing eye had caught me doing something wrong.
For the life of me, I couldn’t think of what it might have been. I’d had an uneventful week and a good night’s sleep. I was racking my brain, but nothing at all stood out to me.
The ten-second clip was of some other driver on the road behaving badly. I had simply used the Methods to maintain my safe driving in the face of an unexpected hazard.
It was a total non-event. I couldn’t even conjure the episode from my own memory bank. The clip was too short to look for clues that would place it in the context of my day.
I walked out of the office with a ‘Lytx Certificate of Excellence’ in my hand. Apparently I’d done something worth recognizing. I just couldn’t remember doing it.
Two things stand out to me about this experience. The first is that it’s a subtle yet profound shift in the nature of ongoing worker surveillance at UPS. We already had telematics, ride-alongs, and random stealth observations. Before Lytx the tacit message had been: we COULD be watching you at ANY time. Now, with Lytx, the message became: we ARE watching you ALL the time.
The other is that I couldn’t point to anything conscious or intentional that I’d done behind the wheel. In the space of about four years, the UPS Methods had become habits, the habits had become skills, and the skills had become second nature. I couldn’t explain it any other way.
I’ve since hung up the brown uniform, but I can’t shake free of the safe-driving Methods. UPS left me a community of former coworkers who are still my friends. It also left me a set of instincts I carry every time I get behind the wheel.
Here are just a few of them:
Back first. Backing first means positioning your vehicle in the direction you plan to drive next. It also means you do your riskiest driving while the scene is still fresh.
If you’ve ever seen the parking lot of a UPS facility, you can pretty much identify which vehicles belong to drivers. Their vehicles are almost always pointing out because they’ve backed into the spaces – or pulled through.
I back first almost every time now – even into my own driveway at home.
Left-Right-Left. Clearing an intersection means looking left, toward the near lane of oncoming traffic, then right, to the far lane across, and then left again to refresh the scene.
Here’s an excerpt from an earlier post:
Before I started my 30-day trial, I rode along with Steve, a 30-plus-year driver. He was already a member of the vaunted Circle of Honor, an elite group of UPS drivers who have not had an avoidable accident for 25 years or more. I asked Steve what his secret was. He told me, ‘I clear each and every intersection before entering it.’ ‘Each and every intersection?’ I pressed him. ‘Yes. I don’t even think about it anymore. I just do it.’
When I wrote this I was incredulous. Now I get it.
Four-Foot Space Cushion. Keep at least four feet of space on all sides of your vehicle, especially in front. And don’t forget overhead clearance. The space cushion is just as important when stopped in traffic as it is while moving through it.
This one is a lot less challenging now that I’m only driving my little sedan than when I was driving big brown rigs, but that image of my vehicle completely encased in a four-foot-thick layer of bubble wrap is burned into my brain.
Safe driving is largely invisible because its successes are non-events. Nothing happens. No collision. No injury. Maybe not even a memory worth holding on to.
That’s what the Lytx camera caught that day: ten seconds I couldn’t remember, because I’d simply driven the way UPS had taught me to drive.
Nobody is paying me to use the Methods anymore. No supervisor is evaluating me, and no Lytx camera is watching. I just drive that way now.
