A Quiet Hurricane Season Won’t Mean a Quiet Year for Road Risk

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) latest Atlantic hurricane outlook is calling for a below-normal 2026 season. It’s welcome news, on its face, for any fleet that has spent years threading dispatch schedules around tropical storm warnings and coastal evacuations.

According to Lytx®’s 2026 Road Safety Report, drawn from more than 341 billion miles of driving data across 6. 3 million commercial drivers, a quieter storm season doesn’t mean a quieter year on the road. In fact, collisions in the construction industry rose 28% in 2025, the steepest increase of any sector Lytx tracks.

“A mild hurricane forecast is genuinely good news, but it’s the kind of headline that can create a false sense of security,” said Brendon Hill, Lytx’s Senior Vice President of Product. “Fleets shouldn’t read a quiet storm season as a quiet year. There are other risks in this data that are just as critical.”

Why weather is not the full story If weather isn’t driving 2026’s risk picture on its own, Hill said the bigger issue is how most fleet safety programs are built in the first place.

“A lot of safety programs are still built on fixed thresholds like a speed limit or a following-distance rule that don’t account for the fact that the same behavior carries different risk depending on conditions,” Hill said. “Risk is always evolving. If it’s not weather, it’s distracted behavior, or a work zone that changes block by block.

You need tools that adapt to the situation, not a rulebook that stays fixed no matter what’s happening on the road.”

That’s the thinking behind Lytx’s dynamic risk platform, which layers real-time weather data, roadwork-zone detection and speed-for-conditions alerts on top of driver-behavior scoring, rather than treating every mile the same regardless of what’s happening around the vehicle.

Lytx’s data shows fog alone makes a severe crash nearly three times more likely than normal conditions, and federal crash data attributes roughly 23% of large-truck crashes to traveling too fast for conditions, not necessarily over a posted limit.

A steep, sector-specific spike Construction posted the smallest improvement in near-collisions of any industry Lytx tracks, meaning fleets in that space aren’t catching the same defensive-driving gains showing up elsewhere. Hill pointed first to what’s happening inside the cab.

“We’re seeing in-cab inattentiveness up sharply year over year, driven by phone use, general distraction, and drivers simply not keeping their eyes on the road,” Hill said. “That’s a real opportunity to talk to drivers about coaching. To be clear, this isn’t about blaming individual drivers.

It’s about giving fleets the visibility to proactively coach before an incident occurs.” The report shows that inattentiveness climbed 168% as a contributing factor in collisions and near-misses year over year, spanning handheld device use, distraction, and eyes off the road. Fleets appear to be responding, though.

Device-use coaching sessions were up 40% in 2025 alone, and following distance, already the single most-coached behavior industrywide, held its position at the top. Why the construction sector specifically? The culprit is not immediately clear from the data, but operational strain is a likely factor.

That pressure comes at least in part from the data center buildout. The timing and the mechanism line up. The construction industry was short 439,000 workers as of last November, due in part to the growth of data centers, which now number more than 400 under active development nationwide.

These roles tend to pay roughly 30% above typical construction wages, pulling skilled tradespeople like electricians and pipe layers away from other job sites and stretching the crews left behind.

Getting better at the worst outcomes, worse at the small ones One of the more counterintuitive findings in this year’s report is that near-collisions fell 23% across every sector Lytx tracks, even as collisions ticked up. Hill said that split is due to two different trends moving at once.

“Fleets are actively training on defensive driving, and it’s working,” Hill said. “Near-collisions are leveling out, and the most severe crashes have actually declined because drivers are taking real precautions, easing off the pedal, covering the brake.” Lytx has leaned into that momentum on the recognition side, too.

Its Safety Recognition tools let fleet managers track the share of drivers with zero coachable events each quarter and issue customizable certificates to reward them, reinforcing the same defensive habits behind the drop in near-collisions. Surprisingly, lower-severity collisions rose 16% while the higher-severity ones dropped.

“That’s not the ‘crashes are getting worse’ story people expect. It means safety programs are getting better at preventing the worst outcomes, even as smaller incidents still slip through.” What fleets should actually do this quarter Asked what a construction fleet manager should change in the n