Instructional Technologies has announced a series of online Urban Driving courses, designed to teach urban driving techniques for a variety of configurations, including light-, medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles. ITI provides training solutions for the transportation industry, including the Pro-Tread online driver training system.

Urban Driving training lays out critical points of safely managing the urban driving environment. For each vehicle configuration, the courses provide specific information about urban driving and defensive driving practices, including:

• Safely handling congested, stop/start traffic

• Managing turns with larger vehicles

• Navigating prescribed routes

• Avoiding avoid issues with other motorists, pedestrians and curbside hazards

“Urban driving is one of the most challenging and stressful jobs in trucking that requires different skills than freeway driving,” said Laura McMillan, vice president of training development at ITI.  “There are distinct challenges related to traffic, routes, turns and distractions. Our new Urban Driving courses were developed to arm drivers with the information they need to drive safely and effectively when these challenges exist.”

ITI makes use of an effective mastery learning training strategy, an instructional method by which the student must master each subject before moving to the next.

The online strategy is designed to improve employee safety behaviors and provide defensible proof that a student has mastered a topic. Fleets have the flexibility to use off-the-shelf Pro-Tread lessons, engage ITI’s Pro-Service team to develop customized content, and use ITI's secure hosting services for their own content.

“Our customers brought the need for Urban Driving courses to us,” McMillan stated. “To reduce the likelihood of accidents, these new lessons promote safety among drivers that operate exclusively in those environments and drivers that have to transition from the relative safety of highways to city streets.”

For more information, click here.