From July 12 to July 18, 2026, law enforcement across the United States, Canada, and Mexico will be watching the road a little harder. It’s Operation Safe Driver Week, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s annual enforcement and outreach blitz and the focus area will be reckless, careless, or dangerous driving.
If you own a fleet or drive for a living, it’s tempting to file this under “just another compliance week.” However, the data behind this campaign has real consequences for CSA scores, insurance premiums, and ISS Scores which determine how often your trucks get pulled for inspection.
What “Reckless” and “Careless” Actually Mean at the Roadside
CVSA draws a precise line between the two. Reckless driving is all about intent. The CVSA defines it as operating a vehicle in willful disregard for the safety of people or property. Careless or dangerous driving doesn’t require intent at all and is defined as driving without due care, attention, or reasonable consideration for others on the road.
The Numbers From Last Year’s Campaign
During the 2025 Operation Safe Driver Week, officers in the U.S. and Canada stopped 8,739 vehicles and issued 2,504 citations and 3,575 warnings. But the “reckless and careless” category itself accounted for only 20 citations and 53 warnings across the entire continent over seven days.
The real tickets came from the everyday behaviors underneath that banner:
· Speeding was the top infraction by a wide margin: 917 citations and 1,249 warnings.
· Handheld device use / texting produced 79 citations and 107 warnings.
· Seat belt violations accounted for 248 citations and 204 warnings.
And commercial drivers bore the brunt of it. Truckers received 1,839 citations and 3,230 warnings last year, compared to just 665 citations and 345 warnings for passenger vehicle drivers which is roughly five times the enforcement attention, even though the campaign targets both groups equally on paper.
The crash data explains why CVSA keeps coming back to these specific behaviors. Speeding was a factor in 11,288 U.S. traffic deaths in 2024; about 29% of all roadway fatalities. Distracted driving killed 3,208 people that same year. Nearly half of the passenger vehicle occupants killed in 2024 weren’t wearing seat belts. And across the
board, CVSA’s position, which is backed by federal crash data, is that driver behavior contributes to roughly 94% of all crashes, which is exactly why this is the one CVSA campaign built around how you drive rather than what you’re driving.
Why a July Ticket Doesn’t Stay in July
Every citation written during Safe Driver Week feeds directly into the Unsafe Driving BASIC in FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System, which stays in the system for 2 years. A higher Unsafe Driving score increases the odds your trucks get flagged for inspection down the road, which creates more opportunities for the next violation. It also feeds how brokers and insurers evaluate your operation. A clean CSA profile is a commercial asset that affects which loads you can book and what you pay for coverage.
Small fleets and owner-operators have the most exposure here. With fewer inspections to average against, a single bad week can move the needle on a score meaningfully more than it would for a large carrier.
Where you run matters, too. According to an analysis of federal inspection data by RigDig, moving violations as a share of total inspection violations climbed from just over 6% in 2023 to nearly 8% in 2025 nationally. But some states run far hotter: Delaware, Indiana, Georgia, and West Virginia all post moving-violation rates above 20%. Which means drivers running those corridors during Blitz Week should expect sharper scrutiny than the national average suggests.
What the People Running This Program Say
CVSA has been consistent about the reasoning behind the two-tier focus. Jake Elvorita, CVSA’s Director of Enforcement Programs, has described the initiative less as a trap and more as a nudge while comparing it to NHTSA’s “Click It or Ticket” model. Speaking about the shift in driving behavior since the pandemic, Elvorita noted that people got used to speeding on emptier highways and “getting aggressive with their behavior” behind the wheel, a habit the campaign is specifically designed to interrupt. When asked whether modest year-over-year improvements in fatal crash numbers were meaningful, his answer was blunt: a few percentage points might not sound like much, “but that’s” hundreds of “lives.”
How to Come Through the Week Clean
None of this requires a special playbook for July 12–18, but rather tighter execution of habits that should already be in place:
· Build in real time. Speeding is the number-one citation every single year, and it’s entirely a scheduling problem. If a route requires speeding to hit a delivery window, the schedule needs fixing, not the driver.
· Mount the phone before you roll. Handheld device use is a federal violation for CMV drivers, carries heavy CSA weight, and is one of the easiest violations to eliminate entirely.
· Belt on, every mile. It’s visible to an officer at a glance and it’s the cheapest and best protection available.
· Manage following distance and lane changes. Both are on CVSA’s watch list and both are habits that erode under fatigue or time pressure.
· Coach, don’t crack down. For fleet managers, this week is a chance to reinforce driver behavior with data like telematics, dash cam alerts, honest feedback. Fleets that already manage behavior year-round tend to see Blitz Week as a non-event.
Operation Safe Driver Week isn’t a speed trap to outsmart for seven days. It’s a magnified snapshot of something that’s true every week of the year: driving behavior is recorded, scored, and carried forward into inspection selection, insurance rates, and standing with brokers. The fleets and drivers who come through clean aren’t the ones who tightened up for one week in July. They’re the ones who were already driving that way.