Truck driver training and safety were the focus of the first World Transportation Trans-Atlantic Summit held this week in Lemont Furnace, Pa.

Government leaders and transportation experts from 20 nations participated in the summit, which began Tuesday and was held by the Driver Training and Safety Institute Inc., a nonprofit corporation owned and operated by Carnegie Mellon University.
Attendees were members of EuroTra, a Belgium-based association that trains 250,000 professional drivers per year. The summit focused on driver training and safety research for the new millennium and was designed to facilitate meetings between representatives of the European Commission and the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The Driver Training and Safety Institute displayed driver training tools, including a driver training simulator from Thomson, USA, a program called Backsafe for the study of the human physical factors relating to driver ability and an on-board recording system using Smart Card technology.
The Driver Training and Safety Institute has for years studied driver fatigue. The Institute received a congressional appropriation of $7.5 million to develop with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration a model center for driver training and safety education and research.