During the week of Oct. 20-26, 2013, law enforcement agencies across North America will engage in stepped up traffic safety enforcement aimed at unsafe driving behaviors, particularly distracted driving by both commercial motor vehicle and passenger vehicle drivers, as part of Operation Safe Driver.

The program is sponsored by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, in partnership with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and support from a number of other organizations.

Last year during this week-long mobilization effort, law enforcement officials engaged with more than 40,000 commercial and passenger vehicle drivers at 1,245 locations across the United States and Canada. This year’s enforcement blitz will be comparable.

Nearly 4,000 people are killed and 100,000 others are injured in large truck and bus crashes each year on the highways, according to CVSA. Many are the direct consequence of aggressive and unsafe driving by truck and bus drivers, as well as the passenger car drivers operating unsafely around them. This fatality figure equates to more deaths than a 737 airplane crashing every two weeks for a year.

Operation Safe Driver was launched in 2007 by CVSA, in partnership with the FMCSA, to address the problem of improving the behavior of all drivers operating in an unsafe manner—either by, or around, commercial vehicles—and to initiate educational and enforcement strategies to address those exhibiting high risk behaviors.

CVSA is an international not-for-profit organization composed of local, state, provincial, territorial and federal motor carrier safety officials and industry representatives from the United States, Canada and Mexico.