Truck drivers say smaller vehicles are the leading cause of crashes involving heavy haulage vehicles and that more education is needed.
It is National Road Safety Week and truck drivers want people in smaller vehicles to consider their behaviour around big rigs amid concerns the crash rate is rising.
The most recent figures from the National Transport Accident Research Centre show 78 per cent of road accidents involving heavy haulage vehicles are not the truck driver's fault.
Western Australian truck driver Julie Gooch said she had witnessed more crashes involving trucks the past 12 months than ever before.
"I just don't ever remember there being this many trucks go over on a daily basis," she said.
"The general public with cars don't really understand how long it takes to stop a truck, so you will quite often get cars put in front of you and slow down, or worse, put in front of you and stop."
Ms Gooch believes the general driver population needs to understand how trucks work.
"In a country like Australia, where everything comes on a truck, I think there just needs to be more education," she said.
'That's my workplace'
Glenn "Yogi" Kendall, who owns Kendall Trucking and Co based in Katanning in southern WA, has becoming increasingly frustrated with the impatience of drivers in smaller vehicles.
"The impatient [nature] of people is really just pushing good drivers and good operators to the wall and making you kinda not want to do the job," Mr Kendall said.
"The road is our work environment — that's my workplace.
"I go there every day, I treat it with respect."
He fears the road death toll will rise without changes to driver behaviour.
"On the daily we're seeing ridiculous behaviour, just no common sense, no thought process," he said.
"I don't understand where these behaviours come from, I really don't."
Rob Sharpe is the executive officer at not-for-profit organisation Transafe WA which aims to educate drivers about sharing the road safely with trucks.
He is an ex-truck driver who left the industry largely due to the safety threat.
"I was a little bit disheartened with the industry because it's just not getting any safer," Mr Sharpe said.
"On the roads, there's not enough education out there to keep the truck drivers safe.
"Unfortunately, we are seeing more heavy vehicle rollovers and accidents and incidents out there. This has a lot to do with our freight task actually increasing as well."
Transafe WA has initiated campaigns to teach current and future drivers about sharing the road with heavy vehicles.
"We do have different road safety campaigns, whether it be the Give a Truck campaign, [or our] more recent and larger campaign our iNSTRUCKTA! safety truck," Mr Sharpe said.
"Every event that we've been to we've been getting praise from truck drivers within the industry, our current road users and also future road users, appreciating the information that we're providing."
He said there were four main issues heavy vehicle operators faced on the road.
They included light vehicles cutting in front of trucks at traffic lights and being overtaking when a larger vehicle was turning.
Vehicles overtaking trucks without allowing enough time to safely execute the manoeuvre, as well as battling blind spots, were also identified as major risks.
