About GAAP Safety

Hello, my name is Chuck and I am the founder, CEO, and Chief Writer and researcher at GAAP Safety Inc. In fact, since GAAP is a brand new company, I’m actually the sole employee and everything else around here.

I formed this company to bring to market what I believe is a somewhat creative, perhaps even unique approach to driver training. My motivation is to prevent people from living through the most awful experience anyone can endure. That experience is the phone call, or knock on the door preceding the notification that a precious loved one will not be coming home.

As a parent who has stood numb at the side of the grave of a beloved child, I know the pain and life changing effect of a sudden unexpected death of a child or spouse. Every time I read about a fatal accident, I think about the family survivors. I know that what follows are some of the most painful days imaginable. This endeavor is my effort to prevent it where I believe it can be prevented.

My study and passion for driving safety began over 40 years ago, when I was employed as a driving instructor. While my career path took different directions over the years, I have maintained a passion for safe driving. In addition, I have studied accident cases and data and followed trends in driver training. Now I am in the process of aggregating this knowledge, leveraging my love of writing and modest presentation skills, to develop tools to promote safer driving.

As an expression of my passion for driving safety, I have developed the GAAP System for Driving Safety.. This system is described by an acronym as explained here. Each of the four parts of the acronym are described in detail on the pages of this website.

Every traffic collision is an event of extremes. No one intends to be involved in a collision, which is why most people call them accidents. A driver was extremely negligent or distracted. A driver was in a hurry. A driver had formed extremely bad habits. A vehicle had an extremely catastrophic failure. There is an endless list of "extremes" that result in collisions.

In north America, our systems of laws and traffic controls, combined with advances in vehicle safety, have worked through the years to reduce traffic collisions and the associated casualties. Yet the number of collisions and resulting injuries and deaths indicate that there is much work to do. Fortunately and unfortunately at the same time, much of that work has to take place in the habits of the drivers themselves. Fortunately because we can learn, change and improve. Unfortunately because many of those changes seem extreme and as such are not made, even though the actual cost of changing is almost unmeasurable. Since collisions are events of extremes, avoidance must be advanced through extreme habits of risk management. We call these habits risk neutralization habits.

As you read the four characteristics of the GAAP system, and apply to those characteristics the logic of the GAAP Safety Triad, you will get a sense of how extreme our approach is. When you complete the reading though, stop and ask yourself if there are parts of it that you need to apply. And ask yourself if your safety, your families safety, and the safety of your driving peers is worth the slight the effort to change. The choice is yours.

Here's an encouraging thought. In baseball, the difference between a 200 and a 300 batting average is one hit more in every ten times at bat. The 300 batter simply applies the additional needed effort to achieve the goal. The difference in the paycheck is in the millions. For most drivers, the changes that the GAAP System encourages are small differences that make for significant safety improvements. They may seem extreme, but in fact, they're just common sense applied with diligence.