On April 8, 2016 at approximately 12:00 a.m., three men were driving a pickup truck on the southbound lane of Interstate 35 at Yarrington Road near a construction zone. A tractor-trailer struck the pickup truck from behind causing it to hit another tractor trailer that was in front of it. The pickup caught on fire.
Kyle police officers were working security for the construction zone and saw the crash. The officers immediately began to help the three gentlemen trapped in the pickup truck. One person, identified as Nathaniel A. Boado, 33 died at the scene. The two other men, identified as Michael Garcia, 42, and Ivan Trujillo, 24, were transported to a hospital for treatment of serious injuries.
The two truck drivers were not injured. The crash is under investigation by the Kyle Police Department.
The current federal weight limit for a large interstate truck is 80,000 pounds, but for some states, there are exemptions and permits allowing even heavier trucks to travel on our roadways. Bigger, heavier trucks are more likely to be in a crash, more likely to cause damage to our roads and bridges, and more likely to result in an injury or death.
On April 21, 2016, at approximately 3:22 a.m., when Angela Valenzuela, 25 had to stop on I-80 freeway due to an earlier accident. As he is waiting for the flow of traffic to resume, Mr. Valenzuela was struck from behind by a tractor-trailer.
The truck and Mr. Valenzuela’s vehicle collided in an area of the highway where lanes blocked off for overnight Caltrans work.
According to CHP Officer Brandon Correia, the vehicles were pushed toward the center divider and careened back into traffic. Three more vehicles were then crashed while trying to avoid the first crash.
Mr. Valenzuela died at the scene. The crash is under investigation by the California Highway Patrol.
Truck driver fatigue has been recognized as a major safety concern and a contributing factor to fatal truck crashes for over 70 years. Studies sponsored by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) reveal that 65% of truck drivers report that they often or sometimes feel drowsy while driving and nearly half of truck drivers admit that they had actually fallen asleep while driving in the previous year.
The Truck Safety Coalition has honored three trucking industry leaders for commitment and dedication to fleet safety.
TSC, often seen as an “anti-truck” group, presented the Distinguished Safety Leadership Award to Greer Woodruff, senior vice president of safety, security and driver personnel of J.B. Hunt Transport Services.
The group gave special recognition for J.B. Hunt’s purchase of 4,000 Wabash trailers with enhanced rear underride protections. The underride guards are engineered to prevent underride crashes at higher impact speeds and overlap percentages. Woodruff was also recognized for using telematics to supervise driving behaviors and enhanced drug testing procedures to promote safe driving at J.B. Hunt.
“The Truck Safety Coalition commends Greer Woodruff for his strong commitment to advancing truck safety during his 28 years at J.B. Hunt,” said John Lannen, executive director of the TSC. “I applaud Woodruff and his team for their tireless efforts to eliminate all crashes involving J.B. Hunt drivers and equipment.”
In addition to Woodruff, TSC announced that Reggie Dupre, CEO of Dupre Logistics, and Steve Williams, chairman and CEO of Maverick USA, will receive the Truck Safety Leadership Award at a later date.
Dupre was noted for implementing a training program for drivers, a fatigue management plan that includes hourly pay for many of Dupre Logistics’ drivers, and the use of “common-sense safety technologies.”
“We also commend Mr. Dupre for his involvement in the Trucking Alliance, which supports an increase for the minimum insurance required by motor carriers, and recently announced its opposition to efforts going on right now in the United States Senate to roll back federal hours of service rules for truck drivers,” said Jane Mathis, vice president of the Truck Safety Coalition.
Williams is a founder of the Trucking Alliance and has advocated for electronic logging devices and opposed increases to truck size and weight. He has also implemented collision avoidance technology on fleet vehicles, including electronic stability control, collision mitigation systems, and lane departure warning systems with forward-looking cameras.
“Steve Williams, Reggie Dupre and Greer Woodruff and their companies are leaders in the Trucking Alliance,” said Lane Kidd, who serves as managing director of the Trucking Alliance. “And these awards are further recognition of their commitment to reduce accidents and a belief that we must work with all transportation stakeholders to promote greater highway safety for truck drivers and motorists alike.”
The Truck Safety Coalition is made up of Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways and Parents Against Tired Truckers. The group is dedicated to reducing the number of deaths and injuries caused by truck-related crashes and provides support to truck crash survivors and families of truck crash victims.
I’d never been a witness to a test crash before. I suppose not many people have. It’s kind of a surreal experience, especially for a person that’s had a loved one die in a violent crash.My husband and I, along with several other of our truck safety volunteers attended an all day conference at the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety in Charlottesville Virginia on Thursday.
And it wasn’t just us in attendance.
In an unprecedented move truck companies, trailer manufacturers, safety advocates, bicycle and pedestrian representatives, policy makers, and researchers were all together in one room to talk about the problem of truck underride.
Most of you don’t know what truck underride is, and I wish I didn’t have to explain it to you. But because our country is a generation behind Europe you probably haven’t seen a truck sporting a side guard to keep a car from traveling under the trailer in a crash.
Perhaps, if you’ve been in New York City or Boston recently, you’ve seen city trucks with side guards; those two cities have now mandated this safety precaution after several bicyclists and pedestrians were killed by falling beneath the trailers and being crushed by the wheels.
Side and rear underride is a huge problem outside cities too. As you pass a semi out on the freeway, and if it’s safe, glance over and see where the underside of that trailer would hit you if you slid under. Just about the height of your head. And if you slide under your airbags won’t deploy as there would be no impact of the engine and front of your car. The first impact would be the windshield, and that won’t save you.
And don’t think you’re safe if you hit a semi from behind. Many of the rear guards were built to 1953 standards and will collapse if you hit them with any speed. Once again, the only thing between your head and the back of that trailer will be the windshield.
So for years safety advocates, including the Truck Safety Coalition, has been asking the Department of Transportation to require better rear guards, and to start the process to mandate side guards. It’s another one of those no-brainer things that we just can’t seem to get done through normal channels.
Thursday’s conference wasn’t a normal channel. Never before has the industry met with the safety people to discuss making changes that would move ahead of any regulations that might some day come out of the D.O.T. Never before has such candid conversations been held, without animosity, without rancor, with only safety in mind.
It was amazing.
At noon we went into the lab and watched a test crash of a Malibu slamming at 35 mpr into the back of a semi trailer that had been equipped with a new, stronger rear guard. Some of us weren’t sure we wanted to witness such a thing, but we’re all glad we did.
Because in this case the new rear guard held up and the passenger compartment, crash dummy inside, was not penetrated. (You can watch the crash test here.) Everyone inside this particular car would have survived. For many people the test crash was the highlight of the day. But I thought the highlight was later in the program.
During the day we had speakers from New York City and Boston tell us about the processes they went through requiring side guards on trucks within their city limits. We had speakers from government talking about where in the regulatory process we are, speakers from trailer manufacturers talking about stronger rear guards that are ready for market now, from a truck company that has ordered 4,000 of the new, safer rear guards, and from Virginia Tech students who showed us their own new design for a stronger, safer rear guard.
Those students almost made me cry. They were undergraduates, the project assigned to them was to build a better rear guard for a semi truck. They, like most people, had never heard of underride crashes before. They learned about the problem, dreamed up a number of potential solutions, weeded their options down to four, and then figured out which one was the most plausible, most acceptable to both the trucking industry and safety advocates.
And then they built a it.
Incredibly 18 and 19 year old young people spent a year on this project, realized the importance of their work, and were brave enough to come and speak about it to a group of adults working in the industry. They were excited about their design and proud to show it off. And a room full of jaded adults sat respectfully listening, leaning forward, following along, congratulation the students at the end for a good design, inviting them to join the industry after they graduate. To think that this whole room of people, including the kids, was there to make the roads safer for everyone. Well. That just about made me tear up.
It should make you tear up too.
Because change is happening. It’s happening because we’ve moved past regulations and asked the industry to listen and to do what’s right. And they are responding. Not everyone. And not every request. But some. And some change will lead to more change. And every step we make toward safety saves another life.
Big trucks need improved underride guards, trucking industry executives, government officials and safety activists agree, but opinions diverge sharply on the design and cost of the safety measures.
That’s what emerged from an all-day conference on deadly underride crashes at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Vehicle Research Center in Ruckersville, Va. Thursday.
Big trucks “are not in any way crash-friendly,” said Robert Molloy, director of highway safety at the National Transportation Safety Board.
Underride is when a passenger vehicle crashes into a semi-tractor trailer or a straight truck from behind or from the side and jams underneath, flattening the passenger compartment and injuring or killing the vehicle’s occupants. The term also describes what happens when bicyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists slide under the body of a truck, usually from the side, and are in danger of being run over.
The industry should “move heaven and earth to make the best-possible protection,” said Marianne Karth.
Karth’s teenage daughters AnnaLeah and Mary, riding in the back seat, died from injuries in a 2013 underride accident. Karth’s Ford Crown Victoria was hit by a truck, spun, hit again and shoved backwards under another semi-trailer, flattening the rear of the passenger compartment.
Federal regulations require trailers and some straight trucks to be equipped with rear underride guards – the bars than hang down on the back of trucks and trailers. In fact, regulation requiring modest underride guards have been in place in the U.S. since 1953.
“It’s incredible that we have vehicles today that we can underride,” Molloy said.
The traffic safety community has resolved similar problems previously, he said.
As sport-utility vehicles became popular in the 1990s their high-riding stance increased damage to cars in crashes.
Regulators and the auto industry, he said, “were quick to act, and now we have vehicles that are more compatible.”
While acknowledging the truck problem, speakers at the roundtable differed on whether the guards should wrap around the truck or trailer, how much the extra weight might cut into payload, and how much the upgrades would increase cost.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is considering a new standard for the guards – partly because of a petition from Karth – but some participants at the roundtable argued that the any likely regulation won’t go far enough to prevent more deadly underride crashes.
To demonstrate the problem, IIHS, an insurance industry trade group, crash-tested the latest-design Stoughton trailer, slamming a 2010 Chevrolet Malibu mid-size sedan into the back of the stationary trailer hooked to a semi-tractor and laden with 34,100 lbs. The test, which IIHS called successful, showed that the trailer’s new-design rear underride guard didn’t intrude into the passenger compartment, making the crash survivable.
The test was what’s called a 30 percent, where a portion of the driver’s side of the car smashes the underride bar.
The collision occurs at 35 mph, the speed at which federal regulations require that a vehicle is strong enough so that its occupants survive a crash.
Stoughton says the new-design rear bars will be standard starting late this year, but refused to provide a cost figure. The company did say the beefier bars would add very little weight, thus not cutting into payload capacity of the trailers.
The biggest change: Four supports across the horizontal bar, not just two. The new ones are on the outer ends of the bar, and all are fastened to a more robust undercarriage, Stoughton says.
As recently as 2013, only Manac had trailers with underride bars that passed the institute’s 30% offset crash test. Now, Vanguard, Wabash and Stoughton trailers also make the cut.
Trailers from Great Dane, Hyundai, Strick and Utility don’t past the test, the institute said.
One manufacturer said the fix is easy and not expensive. Moving the supports farther apart and strengthening the trailer floor to protect cars can be done for $20, and adds just 20 lbs., said Charles Dutil, president of Trailer-maker Manac.
NHTSA has said the fix is much costlier, averaging $2,000. IIHS disputes that figure as too high.
Regardless, the cost and extra weight – 60 lbs. was mentioned several times here — are unlikely to be undue burdens for independent owners-operators, said John Housego of Cary, N.C., who attended the roundtable. He owns a 2010 Freightliner semi-tractor, a 2015 Great Dane trailer and leases an older temperature-controlled trailer when needed for a job.
Housego said he’s willing to spend $1,000 or more on a rear underride-guard retrofit unit that would meet any new federal standard for the rig he owns, but not for a leased trailer.
He also agreed with industry representatives on a panel who said semi-trailer side skirts now used for fuel-saving streamlining could be made more rugged so they’d also serve as underride prevention devices in side crashes.
Panelist Robert Martineau, chief executive of Airflow Deflector, says his panels easily could be made sturdier to serve as crash bumpers as well as aerodynamic aids. He said he couldn’t say what the cost would be until he knows how much force such a panel would be required to withstand.
Officials from New York and Boston at the conference said they put side guards on city-owned trucks, such as waste haulers, and require companies that contract with the cities to install side guards to protect pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycle riders.
Kris Carter, of the Boston’s mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, said when that city began putting side guards onto city vehicles, “it averaged about $1,300 at rollout, the range for us in about $1,000 and $1,800, depending on the vehicle.”
There’s uncertainty over the seemingly straightforward notion of how many people are killed each year in all types of underride accidents.
Federal data from the widely used Fatality Analysis Reporting System logged 5,081 deaths from 1994 to 2014.
Yearly counts range from a low of 198 in 2001 to a high of 299 in 2002. The 2014 count is 228; 2015 data aren’t available yet.
But a September 2013 report from the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine calculated that fatalities from one type of underride collision, the side-crash, are about three times as frequent as the federal data indicates. That’s why some critics are saying the federal data does not represent an accurate fatality count from all types of underride crashes.
The underride crash problem has been debated for decades. Back in 1991 NHTSA rejected extending requirements to prevent underride crashes, stating, “Combination truck side underride countermeasures have been determined not to be cost effective.”
Parents Turn Tragedy Of Losing Son Into Life Saving Mission
MEMPHIS, TN – A Memphis couple traveled to Virginia as part of their mission to turn their tragedy into action.
In November 2014, 33 year old Michael Higginbotham died when his car crashed into a tractor trailer on Walnut Grove near I-240.
The truck driver was making an illegal U-turn.
His parents, Laurie and Randy, began working with advocacy groups to improve truck safety features so another family will not have to go through the same pain.
“He was just a wonderful young man making it in the world doing what you’re supposed to do: having a job, paying taxes, being a productive citizen and all that was taken away on November 18 of 2014,” said Michael’s mother Laurie Higginbotham.
It has been roughly a year and a half since Michael was killed in a car crash with a semi truck on Walnut Grove.
It happened after midnight. The 33 year old was going east on Walnut Grove Road and had just crossed Yates Road when he hit the truck’s trailer.
“Because none of the airbags or anything like that came into play he was killed instantly,” recalled Laurie.
This week the Higginbothams drove to Virginia for a national conference on truck underride crashes.
Government and industry leaders will talk about solutions to reduce truck underride deaths and injuries. The gathering is part of the couple’s new normal to try and help others.
“You shouldn’t have to bury your children. Losing a child is the toughest thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Randy Higginbotham.
“We need the trucks. They need to get the goods to where they need to be and but there should be some safety features that the trucking industry itself can adopt that keeps all of us in passenger vehicles a little safer cause we’re no match against them.”
A crash test of a truck with an improved underride guard will take place at the conference tomorrow.
Arlington, VA (May 5, 2016) – At a time when truck crashes are increasing nationwide and truck safety rules are under attack by special interests in Congress, the Truck Safety Coalition (TSC) recognizes three individuals who stand out for their safety leadership in the motor carrier industry. This happens against the backdrop of the U.S. Senate scheduled next week to take up a transportation spending bill, which includes a provision to roll back the federal rule governing the maximum hours a truck driver can drive and work. Their efforts within their own companies underscore why each of these trucking executives continue to be examples of how good corporate policies can also have good public health and safety results.
The Truck Safety Coalition presented the Distinguished Safety Leadership Award to Greer Woodruff, Senior Vice President of Safety, Security, and Driver Personnel of J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. for his outstanding and longtime dedication to improving truck safety. The award was presented during the Underride Roundtable at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s testing facility in Ruckersville, VA. The conference brought together researchers, safety advocates, government officials, and industry leaders to discuss truck underride crashes, examine the scope of the problem, and determine how to reduce the risks for passenger vehicle occupants through regulation and voluntary action.
“The Truck Safety Coalition commends Greer Woodruff for his strong commitment to advancing truck safety during his 28 years at J.B. Hunt. In particular, we want to recognize his support for his company’s forward-thinking purchase of 4,000 Wabash trailers with enhanced rear underride protections,” said John Lannen, Executive Director of the TSC. “The improved underride guards are engineered to prevent underride crashes at higher impact speeds and various overlap percentages. J.B. Hunt is one of the first companies to adopt this new protection for its trucks. Implementing stronger rear guards to reduce truck crash injuries and deaths will serve as a leading example for the industry.”
“Additionally, Woodruff’s early development of the use of real-time telematics supervision of driving behaviors and enhanced drug testing procedures has promoted safe driving and established him as an industry safety leader. During his tenure, the company has seen reductions in all types of collisions, and their post-accident positive drug tests between 2008 and 2014 were effectively zero percent.” Lannen continued, “I applaud Woodruff and his team for their tireless efforts to eliminate all crashes involving J.B. Hunt drivers and equipment.”
The Truck Safety Coalition also announced that Reggie Dupre, CEO of Dupre Logistics, LLC, and Steve Williams, Chairman and CEO of Maverick USA Inc. will receive the Truck Safety Leadership Awardat a later date.
“Steve Williams has initiated and supported numerous efforts to make the industry safer for truck drivers and the public sharing the road with large trucks. As founder and president of the Trucking Alliance, he has advocated for electronic logging devices and opposed increases to truck size and weight,” Dawn King, President of TSC, stated. “In addition, he has implemented crash-reducing technologies on his company’s trucks such as: electronic stability control since 2004, collision mitigation systems since 2008, and lane departure warning systems with forward-looking cameras since 2013. Under his leadership, and with a focus on safety, Maverick experiences significantly lower driver and vehicle out-of-service rates compared to the national averages.”
Jane Mathis, Vice President of TSC, remarked, “Mr. Dupre has promoted and oversees a safety culture that strives for best practices rather than simply following basic regulations, which he views as minimum standards. This is demonstrated by his implementation of training programs for drivers, a fatigue management plan that includes pay-by-the-hour for many of his drivers, and equipping their fleet with common sense safety technologies, which has helped the company experience much lower driver and vehicle out-of-service rates compared to industry averages. We also commend Mr. Dupre for his involvement in the Trucking Alliance, which supports an increase for the minimum insurance required by motor carriers, and recently announced its opposition to efforts going on right now in the United States Senate to rollback federal hours of service rules for truck drivers. As a leader in the trucking industry, his opposition is critical. Truck driver fatigue is a major problem in the trucking industry and proposed changes included in the current transportation spending bill coming up next week in the Senate will make our roads and highways more dangerous for the public and truck drivers.”
The Truck Safety Coalition is made up of Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH) and Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT). The Truck Safety Coalition is dedicated to reducing the number of deaths and injuries caused by truck-related crashes, providing compassionate support to truck crash survivors and families of truck crash victims, and educating the public policy-makers and media about truck safety issues.
On April 19, 2016, at approximately 9:30 a.m., when a woman identified as Linda Brewster, 47, and her passenger, Lora Piggee, 49, were traveling westbound on I-40 when a tractor-trailer struck the vehicle and a second semi-truck crashed into it from behind.
Both of the women died at the scene and neither of the truck drivers were injured. The crash is under investigation by the Arkansas State Police.
The current federal weight limit for a large interstate truck is 80,000 pounds, but for some states, there are exemptions and permits allowing even heavier trucks to travel on our roadways. Bigger, heavier trucks are more likely to be in a crash, more likely to cause damage to our roads and bridges, and more likely to result in an injury or death.
It is an old congressional ritual: loading up vital spending bills that are meant to keep the government running with dangerous amendments aimed at satisfying ideological causes and benefiting special interests.
The Republicans have become adept at this practice in recent years, and this year is no different. Legislative riders attached to appropriations bills would undermine the Iran nuclear deal, weaken highway safety and reduce the Food and Drug Administration’s authority over tobacco products.
These measures would be unlikely to succeed as stand-alone bills, either because they could not get enough votes on their own or because President Obama would veto them. So better to sneak them in without even holding hearings to make a case on their behalf.
Thankfully, Democratic lawmakers and public interest groups are calling attention to these stealth attacks. In the Senate, Democrats managed on Wednesday to block a vote on a water and energy spending bill after Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, tried to attach a provision that would have dealt a severe blow to the Iran nuclear deal. Mr. Cotton’s measure would have blocked the administration from purchasing heavy water used in Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran has to get rid of the water to comply with the deal. By denying Iran an American market, Mr. Cotton and other Republicans hoped to undermine the deal, which they hate.
The Senate will soon consider a transportation bill containing a rider that could prevent the Department of Transportation from reinstating a rule aimed at making roads safer by requiring that truckers get adequate rest — two nights of rest after working 60 hours over seven consecutive days or 70 hours over eight consecutive days.
The rule took effect in July 2013, but it was suspended by Congress in December 2014. The rider bars the administration from reinstating the rule unless it can show that it produced a “statistically significant” improvement in safety and driver health during the brief time it was in place.
That is a ridiculously high burden to meet. If the provision becomes law, it will be impossible for the government to issue basic regulations to make sure companies are not putting dangerously tired drivers on the road.
And the House Appropriations Committee recently passed an agriculture and food spending bill that would make it very hard for the F.D.A. to regulate tobacco products. A rider attached in committee would forbid the agency from regulating “large and premium cigars”; another would rewrite a 2009 law that gave the agency the authority to approve or reject tobacco products that have entered the market after Feb. 15, 2007. This would include electronic cigarettes, for which the agency has proposed regulations.
To prevent the agency from taking e-cigarettes off the market and effectively grandfather them in, Republican lawmakers want to require pre-approval only for products that come out after the F.D.A. issues its final e-cigarette rules, which could be later this year. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the devices are now more popular than conventional cigarettes with middle- and high-school students.
Riders like these are not harmless passengers on legislative vehicles. They can and will do real damage if they are allowed to succeed.
On April 16, 2016, at approximately 5:40 a.m., a man, identified as Clayton Tripp, 84, was driving a Chevy Malibu westbound on freeway SR44 when he collided with a semi-truck trailer truck and his car was wedged under the truck.
The truck driver was on eastbound SR44 when he was making a U-turn to travel westbound towards interstate 75. He was not injured and was cited for violation of right-of-way.
Mr. Tripp and his passengers, his wife, Janice Tripp, 85, and his daughter, Dianne Tripp, 58, were all seriously injured. One person was airlifted to Ocala Regional Medical Center and the other two were taken in an ambulance. Clayton Tripp died a few days later from his injuries.
Trucks with weak underride guards, or none at all, offer little to no protection for motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians who can possibly crash into the sides or rear of a truck and trailer. Rear underride guards are required on many trucks and trailers, but the standard is antiquated and ineffective in preventing underride crashes from becoming injurious or fatal. Overall, more than 4,000 people are killed injury statistic should be here as well in truck crashes every year in the United States.
On April 12, 2016 at approximately 8:40 a.m., State Trooper Rodney A. Hart, 45, was parked in the right lane of I-70 east of Buckeye Lake helping Shanice J. Parker, 23, with a disabled car when they were both hit by a semi-truck.
According to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, Rodney A. Hart and Shanice J. Parker were both inside the cruiser when the semi-truck drifted into the right lane, drove through the flares, and hit the patrol car. Ms. Parker was airlifted to Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center for treatment of serious injuries. Trooper Rodney A. Hart was transported to Licking Memorial Hospital in Newark for his injuries and later released.
The truck driver, Eric Miller, 36, of Montrose, South Dakota, was not injured and was charged with failure to maintain an assured clear distance ahead, failure to yield to an emergency vehicle and driving a commercial vehicle with impaired alertness.
The crash is under investigation by the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
Truck driver fatigue has been recognized as a major safety concern and a contributing factor to fatal truck crashes for over 70 years. Studies sponsored by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) reveal that 65% of truck drivers report that they often or sometimes feel drowsy while driving and nearly half of truck drivers admit that they had actually fallen asleep while driving in the previous year.
On April 18, 2016, at approximately 3:15 p.m., Richard Crull, 64, was riding a farm tractor westbound on Indiana State Road 218 in the Poneto area when he was rear-ended by a semi-truck. Mr. Crull was pronounced dead at the scene.
The truck driver was not injured and the crash is under investigation by the Wells County Sherriff’s Office.
Forward collision avoidance and mitigation (F-CAM) technology is a proven highway safety technology that could and will save countless lives. Unfortunately, after years of study and successful use by leading motor carriers, this technology has yet to be required for commercial motor vehicles. F-CAM technology can prevent or significantly reduce the damages and losses in many truck crashes.
Statement of Daphne Izer, Founder of Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT)
In Response to Senate Appropriations Committee Passing Industry-Written Provision to Rewrite Laws Affecting Truck Drivers’ Hours of Service
April 21, 2016
For a third year now, the Senate Appropriations Committee has passed a spending bill that was co-authored by a select few trucking industry lobbyists. The industry-penned provision will increase the amount of hours truck drivers can work in a week and deprive truckers of a real weekend off. This is wrong on so many levels. Unfortunately, under the leadership of Senator Susan Collins, who chairs the subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD), this practice is business as usual.
It is outrageous that segments of the trucking industry have been able to use must-pass spending bills as legislative vehicles to drive their agendas that make public safety take a back seat. What is even worse is that the process by which industry lobbyists write and insert their provisions is often highly secretive. This has allowed moneyed interests to make changes to laws governing trucking without so much as a congressional hearing, any federal agency review, or any public input.
Lawmakers should treat safety interests with the same importance as corporate interests, but this has not been the case with this appropriations subcommittee. For instance, I have been advocating for more than 20 years for laws requiring large trucks to have electronic logging devices (ELDs) and heavy vehicle speed limiters. Yet, it took nearly two decades for a Final Rule on ELDs, and the Final Rule for speed limiters was just delayed for the 28th time since being initiated in 2006. When trucking industry lobbyists realized they miswrote language, however, it only took them several weeks to secure an immediate change to the law from their friend in the Senate.
This egregious exploitation of the appropriations process is an affront to truck safety and to the memory of the thousands of Americans, including my son Jeff, who were needlessly killed in large truck crashes. With the one year anniversary of the truck crash that killed the five Georgia Southern University nursing students falling one day after this vote, I want to convey my sincerest sympathy to the families of Emily Clark, Catherine “McKay” Pittman, Caitlyn N. Baggett, Abbie L. Deloach, and Morgan J. Bass. Their deaths should serve as grave reminder that lawmakers need to do much more to combat the role that issues like fatigue play in causing truck crashes, including reversing the provision that was just passed.
It is time for Senator Collins to stop holding this “back door” open for industry insiders to have uninhibited access to write rules and laws that are in their best interest. Instead, she should look at the facts, listen to general public, and use a transparent process.
The industry has given lawmakers language that will set 73-hour maximum work weeks for drivers.
04/19/2016 Michael McAuliff Senior Congressional Reporter, The Huffington Post
WASHINGTON — Safety advocates are crying foul over yet another change to trucking safety rules that the industry is trying to slide though Congress with no hearings, no public evaluation and no scientific study.
The move comes just days after The Huffington Post revealed that large trucking industry groups have spent the last several years quietly circumventing normal legislative procedures to win safety rule concessions — even as truck crashes have been on the rise.
Normally, transportation policy is decided by the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. But failing to make progress there, the trucking industry seems to have persuaded the Appropriations Committee to add its policy provisions to spending bills.
In this case, according to advocates who have been briefed about the bill, the industry wrote a provision that will place some sort of cap on truckers’ work, keeping either driving or working hours to 73 per week.
Exactly what the cap — which is about 30 hours more than most Americans work each week — would mean is not completely clear. Representatives for Democratic and Republican leaders on the committee declined to make the language available to HuffPost, saying it will be public after the full committee considers the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development spending bill for 2017 this Thursday.
“They are writing law in a spending bill. They are completely bypassing the Commerce Committee,” said Jackie Gillian, the president Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
Gillian says the measure appears to have been written by the American Trucking Associations, a industry lobbying group. If the move succeeds, if could permanently change rest rules for increasingly beleaguered truck drivers — with no public input, no scientific evaluation and no discussion with regulators.
“It is like the worse of all possible worlds,” Gillian said. “The idea that the ATA has come in and written into law what they want done — I mean, can you imagine if this were the Federal Aviation Administration?”
The ATA did not say whether it wrote the new measure, though it offered comment on it and seemed to know what language it contained.
Ironically, the new provision is being dropped into a spending bill in an effort to correct confusion over another measure that was added through the appropriations committee, also without hearings or vetting.
The ATA first managed to get Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to write legislation in 2014 to temporarily suspend rest rules that took effect in July 2013, which required drivers to get two nights of sleep and capped their working hours at 70 per week.
Collins’ one-year suspension also required a study of making drivers get two nights of sleep in a row as part of their weekly mandated 34-hour break, known as a restart. But the industry was unsatisfied. It won further modifications in 2015 for this year’s spending bill that made the study more complicated, and said that if the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration did not write new rules based on the study, the rules would revert to the old ones.
The problem was the language didn’t clarify which older rules it was referring to, meaning regulators could be turning back to mandates from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration that capped drivers’ hours at 60 a week — much more rest than under the modern system.
An ATA spokesman said the new 73-hour cap is meant to address this confusion.
“What the Senate language appears to do is retain the ability of drivers to reset their work weeks by taking an extended 34-hour off-duty period, with the recognition they are still limited to 73 hours of work (both driving and other work time) in seven calendar days,” Sean McNally said in an emailed comment.
“We appreciate the recognition by the Senate THUD subcommittee that the legislative drafting error from 2016 needs to be fixed,” he added.
McNally downplayed advocates’ concerns about over-tried truckers.
“ATA also knows that while professional truck drivers do not work wildly inflated weekly work hours that anti-truck groups claim, we understand the Subcommittee’s sensitivity to claims a handful of drivers might abuse the restart rule to work long hours in a week,” McNally said. “We look forward to working with members in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle to ensure that professional truck drivers continue to have the opportunity to get extended off-duty rest periods that reset their work week.”
The issue seems to have left Democratic Senators in a difficult position. While they would prefer the 2013 rules that gave truckers two nights of sleep, they also fear they don’t have the votes to block the 73-hour week.
Safety advocates told HuffPost that the ATA had tried to attach a 75-hour week to the Commerce Committee’s FAA bill that passed the Senate Thursday, but the measure was blocked.
Senate staff also declined to give the safety advocates copies of the new measure’s language, which would reveal specifically what the impact would be.
Gillian believed the reason is because the implications will not be good.
“They won’t release the sub-committee draft because they know what’s in there, and they know safety groups will go nuts,” Gillian said.
“This is their [the trucking industry’s] most bold and anti-safety measure yet,” she added.
On April 12, 2016 at approximately 8:40 a.m., State Trooper Rodney A. Hart, 45, was parked in the right lane of I-70 east of Buckeye Lake helping Shanice J. Parker, 23, with a disabled car when they were both hit by a semi-truck.
According to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, Rodney A. Hart and Shanice J. Parker were both inside the cruiser when the semi-truck drifted into the right lane, drove through the flares, and hit the patrol car. Ms. Parker was airlifted to Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center for treatment of serious injuries. Trooper Rodney A. Hart was transported to Licking Memorial Hospital in Newark for his injuries and later released.
The truck driver, Eric Miller, 36, of Montrose, South Dakota, was not injured and was charged with failure to maintain an assured clear distance ahead, failure to yield to an emergency vehicle and driving a commercial vehicle with impaired alertness.
The crash is under investigation by the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
Truck driver fatigue has been recognized as a major safety concern and a contributing factor to fatal truck crashes for over 70 years. Studies sponsored by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) reveal that 65% of truck drivers report that they often or sometimes feel drowsy while driving and nearly half of truck drivers admit that they had actually fallen asleep while driving in the previous year.
On April 12, 2016, at approximately 4:00 a.m., the driver, identified as Jordan Mefford, 23, and his girlfriend, Jacqueline Hayes, 26, were driving southbound on I-71 in Henry County when a tractor-trailer traveling north crossed the median and struck their vehicle.
Jacqueline Hayes was pronounced dead at the scene and Jordan Mefford was airlifted to University of Louisville Hospital for treatment, but later died that night due to his injuries.
The driver of the tractor trailer was also taken to the University of Louisville Hospital for treatment. The crash is under investigation by the Kentucky State Police.
Truck driver fatigue has been recognized as a major safety concern and a contributing factor to fatal truck crashes for over 70 years. Studies sponsored by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) reveal that 65% of truck drivers report that they often or sometimes feel drowsy while driving and nearly half of truck drivers admit that they had actually fallen asleep while driving in the previous year.
LISBON — As many of my fellow Mainers know, after my son Jeff was killed by a tired trucker in 1993, I founded Parents Against Tired Truckers and began advocating to make trucking safer.
In over two decades of educating the public and lawmakers about truck safety, I have also worked to ensure that regulations like maximum driving hours and mandated meal and rest breaks are implemented to improve work conditions for truckers and to prevent fatigue-related truck crashes.
The fact that a fatigued truck driver killed my son is not unique. One survey found that 65 percent of truck drivers reported being drowsy while driving and 48 percent admitted to having fallen asleep while driving. And according to the National Transportation Safety Board, fatigue is a probable cause, a contributing factor or finding in nearly 20 percent of their investigations between 2001 and 2012. Clearly, we should not be hindering the government’s efforts to set maximum hours and require rest breaks.
Instead, we should be looking at ways to change the industry culture, which promotes driving faster and farther, even if a driver is tired. Given that so many truck drivers are paid per mile, it is no wonder that the industry has created this culture, which ultimately rewards unsafe behavior.
However, there are clear signs that the industry must change its ways. Driver pay has effectively dropped by nearly a third since deregulation in the 1980s, and employment turnover rates constantly hover over 90 percent.
According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s National Survey of Long-Haul Truck Driver Health and Injury, nearly 75 percent of long-haul truck drivers received an unrealistically tight delivery schedule, and nearly 40 percent of long-haul truck drivers reported violating hours-of-service rules. This is a consequence of shippers, brokers and motor carrier management forgetting that drivers are not merely assets, and that crashes are not merely the cost of doing business.
The hours-of-service rules were put in place to cap the maximum amount of hours truck drivers can work to ensure that they are adequately rested and can safely operate their vehicles. Yet there are many people, including our members of Congress, who misunderstand this.
The sad truth is that there are truck drivers who routinely work over 80 hours per week, and do so without actual weekends off. This is wrong, unsafe and a result of the industry’s relentlessly rallying against hours-of-service rules and successfully convincing lawmakers to ratchet up the amount of time truck drivers are allowed to work.
It is unfortunate that U.S. Sen. Susan Collins is once again behind an industry-backed measure to weaken hours-of-service rules and embolden unsafe driving behavior that contributes to countless preventable truck crashes. And it is equally unfortunate that the senator has made a tradition out of pushing the trucking industry’s agenda to weaken hours-of-service rules through the appropriations process, which bypasses any public input.
If she really believes that this is something that will make trucking safer and be supported by most Americans, then she should have a hearing and listen to the 80 percent of the public who oppose legislative efforts to increase the number of hours that semi-truck drivers are allowed to work in a week – not just to industry lobbyists.
As chairwoman of the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee, Collins knows that such policy changes have no place in a spending bill. As a bipartisan senator, she knows that there are proven methods that she could work with Democrats to enact, like crash avoidance technologies and adequate underride protections.
And as a fellow Mainer, she knows of the tragic loss experienced by people like me; like Christina Mahaney, whose 5-year-old son Liam was killed in 2011 when a truck driver spilled a load of logs into the family’s Jackman home, and like the countless other parents, children, siblings, spouses and friends – loss that could have been prevented by stronger truck safety laws.
Ultimately, our lawmakers have a duty to address the issue of truck driver fatigue and take action to prevent needless truck crash deaths and injuries. Increasing a truck driver’s workweek from 70 to 82 hours will definitely not solve this problem, but allowing truck drivers to have a real weekend off by requiring a 48-hour restart will.
Daphne Izer of Lisbon is the mother of Jeff Izer, who was killed in 1993 when a truck driver fell asleep at the wheel of his big rig. She is founder and co-chair of Parents Against Tired Truckers, now in Washington under the Truck Safety Coalition.
WASHINGTON — Illinois State Trooper Douglas Balder sat in his squad car, its red and blue lights strobing into the frozen night of Jan. 27, 2014. He was about to be set on fire.
Balder had stopped to assist a Chicago-bound big rig that had stalled out in the rightmost lane of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway. A heavy-duty tow truck and a bright yellow Tollway assistance vehicle were also pulled over, attending to the stranded semi.
Balder, a Navy reservist and father of two, had his heater cranked against minus-30-degree wind chill. He had positioned his 2011 Crown Victoria behind the Tollway vehicle and switched on his flashers. There were also flares sputtering on the pavement, and the Tollway truck was flashing a large blinking arrow and its amber hazard lights. Visibility on that clear, cold night was excellent — around 10 miles.
Renato Velasquez, who was barreling toward the stopped vehicles in a flatbed big rig loaded with three massive rolls of steel, didn’t see Balder’s flashers. He didn’t see the pulsing arrow or the flares. He didn’t change lanes or take any evasive action until far too late. Velasquez was falling asleep, a court would find later. His truck rammed into Balder’s squad car at 63 miles per hour, according to the National Transportation Safety Board investigation into the accident.
The impact crushed the Crown Vic’s trunk, exploding the gas tank and catapulting the patrol car into a roadside ditch. The three 14,580-pound steel coils chained to Velazquez’s trailer bed burst their restraints. One of the massive rolls struck the cab of the Tollway vehicle, instantly killing its 39-year-old driver Vincent Petrella and injuring Agron Xhelaj, the driver of the stalled truck who was seated beside him.
Balder had lost consciousness when his face hit the steering wheel.
“I woke up a short time later on fire,” he said. “Literally on fire. Burning alive.”
In that moment, Balder didn’t know exactly what had happened. His squad car was half collapsed. The detonated gas tank was spraying fuel and flames through his cab. His only clear thoughts were of survival and of his wife of 14 years, Kimberlie. He yelled out her name.
“A certain degree of that was emotion at the moment, knowing that I might die, screaming to the last person you might love,” he said.
Balder needed to find a way to escape if he was ever going to see his wife and kids again.
He tried to start his engine, then tried to radio for help. Fire was spreading from around the partition behind him, burning his back, head and legs. He couldn’t open his door or window. He tried the switches on his armrest, and the passenger window miraculously cranked down.
“As that cold air came in and swirled that air around, adrenaline set in, and I flew out,” he said. “The only other choice was to sit there and die.”
He tumbled out on the roadside, rolling in the snow to extinguish the flames that had already scorched more than a third of his body. By the time he stumbled around the back of the wreck and back up to the road, local police were arriving to help.
“You got this guy walking up with his skin hanging off his arm,” Balder said. “My pants were all burned off to the skin.”
He spent six weeks in a medically induced coma, three months in the hospital, and needed 10 surgeries and extensive, ongoing rehab to recover.
Illinois State Police
Balder’s patrol car was completely burned in the accident.
Increasing Carnage On Our Highways
In the two years since the accident, Balder has had plenty of time to think about what happened to him — and why. On the simplest level, it happened because a criminally negligent driver pushed too hard and crashed. But it is also part of a broader trend of declining safety on the roads after decades of progress — a trend that the United States Congress has aided and abetted by loosening safety rules even as both truck drivers and trucks are being pushed to their limits, just like Renato Velasquez.
Truck-related deaths hit an all-time low during the economic doldrums of 2009, when 2,983 truck accidents killed 3,380 people. But as the economy has recovered, the carnage has been on the rise. In 2013, the most recent year for which finalized statistics are available, 3,541 wrecks killed 3,964 people — an increase of 17.3 percent in just four years. In 2014, the number of deaths resulting from truck accidents was down slightly, but the total number of crashes and injuries increased.
At the same time, Congress has been caving, very quietly, to lobbying from trucking interests that want to roll back, block or modify at least a half-dozen important safety regulations. Significant parts of the hauling industry have long opposed many of the federal rules governing working hours, rest periods, size and weight limits, and safety standards. When the Great Recession began in 2008, profit margins for shippers shrank and bankruptcies rose, prompting a desperate industry to step up its lobbying effort.
Perhaps, the trucking companies’ lobbyists suggested to Congress, trucks could haul loads heavier than the federal 80,000-pound limit, which would allow them to deliver more goods with each truck. Maybe they could have longer double trailers, increasing the limit from 28 feet for each unit to 33 feet — turning each rig into an 80-foot-long behemoth, as long as an eight-story building is tall. Or they could let truck drivers be more flexible with their rest breaks, which would allow them to work up to 82 hours a week instead of the already-exhausting limit of 70. Maybe trucking firms could reduce labor costs by hiring lower-paid drivers, younger than 21 — as young as 18. Maybe they could stop federal regulators from raising insurance requirements that were set during the Reagan administration. Maybe the federal motor carrier safety ratings for unsafe trucking companies could be kept secret.
Indeed, the trucking industry is trying to do all of those things. If they are successful, these changes would amount to the most significant overhaul of highway safety rules in decades. But most people don’t know such sweeping revisions are even being considered.
Asleep At The Wheel
The latest round of congressional wrangling started with a fight over snoring, or, more specifically, the obstructive sleep apnea that causes it.
For decades, mounting evidence has shown that sleep apnea, a common disorder, can cause perilous levels of fatigue in drivers, pilots, train engineers and others who need to remain alert at work. The airways of people who suffer from apnea close repeatedly while they sleep, interrupting their breathing dozens of times an hour. They often don’t notice the interruptions, but it leaves them exhausted and prone to doze off during the day. Behind the wheel of a large, speeding vehicle, the results are predictably catastrophic.
It’s not just a problem for truckers. As investigators sorted through a Dec. 1, 2013, Metro-North commuter train derailment in New York that killed four people, they found the engineer at the controls, William Rockefeller, had fallen asleep. His shift had recently been changed, which can cause sleep problems in itself, but he also had undiagnosed sleep apnea.
Since 2008, experts with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which regulates the trucking industry, have recommended that drivers get checked for the condition and treated if necessary. The NTSB lists sleep apnea as a problem across the transportation industry, and often points to the Metro-North wreck as evidence of why the trucking industry in particular needs better regulation — its rules are the weakest of the major transportation sectors.
The risk of apnea rises dramatically with weight gain, and approximately two-thirds of all truck drivers are believed to be obese, according to a recent federal survey. Other studies have also found that truckers are much more likely to be overweight than workers in other fields. And extensive research links sleep deprivation to heightened crash risks; even moderate tiredness can impair a driver as much as being legally intoxicated. A recent Harvard study found truck drivers with obstructive sleep apnea are five times more likely to crash than their fellows.
To do a better job dealing with the issue, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration floated a proposal in April 2012 that would have required overweight truckers to get checked for sleep apnea. The industry was livid. Some drivers claimed there was no evidence that sleep apnea raised the risk of crashes, while others alleged the proposal was a scheme to enrich sleep doctors.
Independent truckers are especially loath to admit a problem because treatment can take them off the road for a month or more. And sleep tests and treatment cost thousands of dollars for people with inadequate or no health insurance.
Despite acknowledging the problem and the need to deal with it, FMCSA backed off its push to update the apnea rules. Just a week after posting the proposal, the agency withdrew it, claiming it was published in error.
Going After Congress
The trucking industry did not let the matter drop, though. Instead, its lobbyists launched a pre-emptive strike.
Normally, when an agency like FMCSA targets a specific issue, it uses its existing authority to propose binding guidance. Taking this route — which the agency started to do with apnea — is easier than embarking on a full federal rulemaking process, which can take years, requires even more extensive input from the public and industry, and often triggers long legal battles.
Rather than taking the chance that FMCSA might resurrect its proposal on apnea screening, industry lobbyists approached allies in Congress to write a law that would require the agency to follow the longer, more cumbersome formal rulemaking course.
Trucking industry lobbyists sold the bill as a safety enhancement. In their telling, it sounded like truckers were asking regulators to come up with a way to screen for dangerous apnea, not blocking an effort to enhance screenings.
Members of Congress bought the spin. “I can only hope that the agency, which has a long docket, in fact gets to this rulemaking,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) in a brief discussion on the the House floor. “I’m not sure why the agency was going to do guidance instead, but this is a very important issue. There have been accidents attributed to sleep apnea.”
Then-House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) allowed the bill’s sponsors to bring it to the floor on Sept. 26, 2013, when the country was focused on the prospect of a looming government shutdown in the next four days. Safety advocates had little opportunity to raise objections. The bill passed with no opposition and was sent to the Senate. It passed the upper chamber a week later, in the middle of the shutdown, with no debate or even a roll-call vote. The legislation was slipped into a string of unanimous consent requests, lost among resolutions supporting democracy in Venezuela and recognizing Danish Holocaust survivors. President Barack Obama signed the law on Oct. 15, without comment, just before the government shutdown ended.
Less than two months later, the Metro-North engineer took a curve along the Hudson River in the Bronx at 82 miles per hour — 52 mph over the limit — while he dozed at the controls. Seven cars derailed. Three of the four people killed were ejected from the train. No one noticed that Congress had just made it more difficult to screen truckers for similar sleep disorders.
Eugene Gologursky via Getty Images
In December 2013, a Metro-North commuter train engineer with undiagnosed sleep apnea fell asleep and caused a derailment that killed four people.
Congress Waters Down Safety Rules
Horrifying crashes have a way of focusing Congress’ attention on safety — at least while the headlines are bold and the corpses are fresh. The rest of the time, lawmakers tend to listen to industry groups, which warn of job losses and higher costs if their demands aren’t met. These conversations happen inside the cloister of legislative process, shielded from scrutiny. If what business wants doesn’t put health or safety first — and it often doesn’t — politicians try to meet the demand by adding provisions to much larger legislative vehicles, where they may be impossible to dislodge, if they are even discovered at all.
Consider this example.
In July 2013, the FMCSA enacted a regulation modifying an existing rule that says drivers must take 34 hours off after they hit certain maximum time limits working and driving. The new restriction mandated that truckers include two nights in that break, with no driving between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. The new rule effectively cut the maximum hours drivers could work from 82 per week to 70. Studies show that humans get the best, most restorative rest while slumbering at night, and truckers face especially tough schedules, so the restriction forced drivers to have two restful, overnight periods in their break, which is known as a “restart.”
But trucking lobbyists argued that making drivers sleep at night was more dangerous because it would put more trucks on the road in the morning hours, with commuters and school buses. The industry pointed to data that shows more accidents occur when there are more vehicles on the roads during the day. The lobbyists neglected to mention data showing that the rate of fatal accidents actually more than doubles during the overnight hours, even with vastly fewer automobiles on the roads.
As soon as the updated regulation went into effect, trucking groups demanded changes, but FMCSA, which had spent years working on the rule, wasn’t listening. That left the industry with the choice of pursuing an uncertain challenge in the courts, or appealing to Congress for relief.
By law, Congress can vote to disapprove a new executive agency regulation, such as the sleep rule, within 60 work days of the rule’s publication. If Congress doesn’t pass a disapproval resolution, lawmakers can propose specific legislation undoing the new rule, and hold hearings on the proposal in the relevant committee — in this case, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
Going through either of those processes is the transparent, above-board approach. But that path does not often get the trucking industry what it wants. For years, the late New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D), a member of the commerce committee, blocked anything that he thought eroded highway safety, as did other safety-conscious members on the committee. Lautenberg’s successor, Sen. Cory Booker (D), has sought to take up that mantle.
The trucking industry needed a detour. It looked for an alternate route through the Senate Appropriations Committee, and found Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who represents the trucking-friendly state of Maine. Collins added a provision temporarily barring FMCSA from spending any money to enforce its new rule and requiring additional study of the issue to a $54 billion transportation bill during an untelevised legislative markup in June 2014.
The under-the-radar move might have been the end of the new rule. But unlike with the apnea bill a year before, a headline-grabbing tragedy caught the nation’s attention shortly before the appropriations bill made it to the full Senate. Two days after Collins got her amendment included, an exhausted Walmart truck driver speeding along the New Jersey Turnpike slammed into comedian Tracy Morgan’s limo. The wreck killed Morgan’s friend James McNair and left Morgan and four others severely injured.
NTSB
Tracy Morgan’s limo van was crushed by a truck whose driver fell asleep at the wheel.
The crash generated headlines around the world, and once again focused the nation’s attention on the dangers of sleep-deprived drivers behind the wheels of 80,000-pound vehicles.
When the transportation spending bill came to the Senate floor on June 19, Booker was waiting with his own amendment to block that of Collins. He took up his microphone and delivered a blistering speech against the provision, forcing Collins to defend the measure. But before the bill went to a vote, Senate leaders pulled the measure from consideration, in part because of the sudden controversy.
Collins didn’t give up, though. When the nation was again facing a government shutdown in the winter, she managed to slip her sleep-rule provision into the so-called CRomnibus, a huge, unwieldy spending measure that needed to pass by Dec. 13 to keep the government open. No one outside of Congress knew that the trucking provision had been attached to the bill until lawmakers shoved their shambling creation into the light on Dec. 9, four days before it needed to pass. At that point, the measure could not be blocked, as it had been in the aftermath of Tracy Morgan’s crash. Like the sleep apnea rule a year before, it passed under the cover of a funding battle, much to the disappointment of safety advocates, including Morgan’s lawyer, Benedict Morelli.
“I don’t understand how in good conscience anybody could be pushing to relax the federal rules,” Morelli said. “The reason that they’ve been put in place is to make sure this doesn’t happen — and it happens a lot.”
Shocking Headlines, Shockingly Often
Morelli is right: Accidents like those that nearly killed Balder and Morgan happen with startling regularity. For instance, last spring while Congress was again quietly targeting trucking regulations, a string of crashes showed vividly the consequences of overtired truckers pushing past their limits.
On April 22, 2015 a truck driven by John Wayne Johnson barreled through a line of cars backed up by an earlier truck crash on Interstate 16 in Georgia. Johnson killed five nursing students from Georgia Southern University headed to their last training shift of the year. Lawsuits filed over the wreck say he had sleep apnea and a history of falling asleep at the wheel. He also may have been looking at pornographic pictures.
On May 19, witnesses saw a tractor-trailer drifting between lanes as it neared a construction zone on that same Georgia interstate, near I-95. The driver, David Gibbons, 61, smashed his rig into the stopped cars and also killed five people.
On June 25, Benjamin Brewer, 39, spent 50 hours at work and was allegedly high on meth when he approached construction traffic on I-75 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was going so fast, his truck careened on for 453 feet after impacting the first car, according to the NTSB. He killed six people.
On July 23, trucker Ruslan Pankiv failed to notice traffic backed up at a construction zone on I-65 near Lafayette, Indiana. He plowed through the stopped vehicles, killing five people, including a mother, her two young sons and himself. Again, police suspected fatigue.
Those are just cases for which drowsiness was explicitly stated as a possible cause. Most independent experts believe fatigue-related wrecks are significantly undercounted since there is no roadside exam or blood test for drowsiness, and drivers are often reluctant to admit they were nodding off.
In the case of Renato Velasquez, he insisted he hadn’t dozed off, but he could come up with no other explanation his wreck. By the time the scientifically careful NTSB released its final report on Velasquez’s accident, on Feb. 9, 2016, he’d already been convictedand sentenced to three years in prison for driving while fatigued, ignoring federal rest rules, driving too fast and failing to yield.
What’s beyond debate is that hauling loads across America’s highways is a draining, exhausting existence. And it’s only gotten tougher since President Jimmy Carter and Congress deregulated the complex rules governing the economic side of the industry in 1980, making it much easier for new companies to get into the business and setting off a surge in competition.
The change was good for consumers, who saw shipping prices drop as lower-cost carriers pushed out unionized firms. And safety did not immediately suffer, because technology improved and both the government and carriers grew more conscious of the practices that reduce the risk of crashes.
But as unions vanished and the need for productivity and efficiency rose, pay for truck drivers plummeted. They now make less than they did in the late 1970s when wages are adjusted for inflation. And there are now tens of thousands of small, poorly financed new trucking companies that have great incentive to push drivers as hard as they can.
Those drivers, who are often independent and own their own rigs, have to cope with managers’ demands and all the safety rules that still exist, even as the close-to-the-bone industry leaves little room for error. Unpredictable hours, uncertain traffic, long stretches spent sitting alone behind a wheel, and meals that depend on roadside greasy spoons take a toll on drivers’ health. All that adds up to a circumstance that encourages drivers — especially the growing number who have strict drop-off and pick-up times set in their contracts — to take chances. And they do, frequently ignoring rest rules to make their schedules. Drivers for smaller outfits are especially likely to break the rules.
Renato Velasquez is a case in point.
His daughter Yesenia told NTSB investigators that her father had dreamed of driving big rigs. He had been a bus driver in rural Mexico, transporting workers to farms back in the ‘80s. He immigrated to the United States, and in 2007 earned his commercial driver’s license in Illinois. His first job driving flatbeds was at a company called M&A, where his brother worked, and where he learned the federal safety rules.
Velasquez told the NTSB he took a job with another firm, DND International, in 2011, after meeting the company’s manager, Dimitar Dimitrievsky. The company, one of thousands of small-time shipping operations that have proliferated since deregulation, employed 49 drivers. Those drivers logged 5.4 million miles in 2013, the year before Velasquez’s crash.
Velasquez seldom saw the boss, or any other workers, and was dispatched remotely, according to his interview with federal investigators. He and another driver said they would drop off their logbooks and other records at a box outside Dimitrievsky’s house once a week. There appeared to be little oversight or enforcement at the company, the NTSB concluded. Although Velasquez said he never got safety training from his employer, records say that he received at least a little, and the company did possess some of the required safety training materials. But DND also possessed a terrible, albeit remarkably common, safety record.
In the two years before the crash, DND drivers had been subjected to 289 inspections, according to federal records. Its drivers had been ordered off the roads 27 times, most often for hours-of-service violations — driving more than the legal limit. The vehicles themselves were found to be in violation 26 times in 131 inspections, a failure rate of 20 percent. The company racked up seven crashes between March 2012 and January 2014, causing one fatality and four injuries. Those stats meant that DND had alerts in two Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) that the FMCSA uses to rate companies and identify dangerous carriers. BASIC serves as the foundation for the agency’s Safety Measurement System — a system that the trucking industry despises. DND had poor scores in the BASIC standards for safe driving and driver fatigue. The chances of a firm being involved in a fatal crash jump by 93 percent when it has an alert on unsafe driving and by 83 percent when it has received a warning for excessive hours-of-service violations, according to agency data. And firms with two alerts have crash rates that are double the average among companies with no alerts.
Independent drivers like Velasquez and his colleagues are paid by the load, not by the number of hours they work. A decent living requires good loads. To get good loads, a trucker needs a strong relationship with his trucking company’s dispatchers, who take orders from shipping brokers and route them to available tractors. Trips that are longer, more time-consuming or force the driver to return empty — hauling “flying canaries” or “dispatcher brains” — can even cost a driver money. A DND driver named Stanford Dean told NTSB investigators that his loads weren’t even dispatched in the United States. They came from someone based in Macedonia.
“Do you know how difficult it is to make money?” Dean asked investigators who confronted him over discrepancies in his logbooks. “I’m a safe guy, but there’s issues sometimes,” Dean added. “There’s so many obstacles. If anybody tells you they roll 100 percent by the book, they’re lying to you.”
On Velasquez’s fateful run, he had a decent assignment from the dispatchers, hauling power cables approximately 450 miles from Illinois to Nebraska, for a $1,600 fee. On the way back he would stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to pick up three steel coils that he would haul a little more than 200 miles back toward home, for a fee of $550. After gas, tolls and DND’s 20 percent cut, he would pocket about $1,000 for the out-and-back.
According to Velasquez’s logbook for the trip that killed Vincent Petrella, he followed safety rules. It says Velasquez left Hanover Park at 11:45 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 26, carrying a 6,707-pound load of cable to the Omaha Public Power District in Elkhorn, Nebraska. The entries say he reached Des Moines, Iowa, at about 5:30 p.m., took a 45-minute break, then motored on to Elkhorn by 9 p.m., keeping his driving time well inside the 11-hour limit and his on-duty hours within the 14 permitted in a day.
But Velasquez’s logbook was a work of fiction.
Investigators would later learn how badly things went wrong for Velasquez, and how severely he broke the rules, leading to his deadly exhaustion.
Velasquez’s cell phone and toll records showed he didn’t set out on the trip until nearly six hours after the time he recorded in his logbook, and he kept driving well past the time that he claimed he had settled in for a night’s rest.
The problem was that this was a trip across the Midwest in the dead of winter, with a brutal deep freeze, snow, fog and whipping winds along the way. Ahead of Velasquez on I-88, two other trucks crashed at 9:43 p.m. in whiteout conditions, shutting down the highway for four hours. Velasquez wasn’t even out of Illinois at that point, and that traffic jam may have been his only rest in 37 hours. According to the truck’s engine records retrieved by the NTSB, the longest it was idle that Sunday night and early Monday morning was for less than three hours.
Velasquez couldn’t just pull in for some extra rest after the long night. A requirement of the delivery contract with the Omaha Public Power District was a punctual drop-off at 8:30 in morning. The driver logged in at the drop-off at 8:45 a.m. Records showed Velasquez departing at 9:20 for a 300-mile run to Cedar Rapids, where his pickup window for the three steel coils began at 4 p.m. He left at 5:15 with another 200-plus miles and four hours left to reach home.
But about an hour before he got that far, a truck that hauled containers from railways broke down ahead of him in Aurora, Illinois, just shy of Velasquez’s destination. It was owned by a firm called Michael’s Cartage that had alerts in four of the FMCSA’s troubling categories, including maintenance. Its drivers falsified work logs more than half of the time, according to an NTSB review. Just like with DND International, the numbers suggested the carrier was more than twice as likely to wind up in a crash. In this case, the Cartage truck became the hazard that Velasquez failed to avoid.
He never wrote down his final stop, at 9:20 p.m. — when he dozed off at the wheel and forever changed Doug Balder’s life.
Paying For Influence
The leader of the trucking industry’s campaign to tilt federal regulations in its favor is an alliance of the nation’s largest shippers called the Coalition for Efficient and Responsible Trucking, or CERT. Its most prominent members are FedEx and UPS.
Members of CERT have donated more than $13 million to federal election campaigns since 2012, and spent $80 million on well-connected lobbyists, according to a Public Citizen study from 2015 using data from the Center for Responsive Politics, as well HuffPost’s analysis of more recent congressional lobbying reports through the rest of the year. The American Trucking Associations, which advocates on behalf of the industry, spent another $8 million on lobbying and $2.4 million on elections. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, another industry group, has chipped in $3.5 million for lobbying and $790,000 on campaigns. It amounts to more than $20 million spent each year, solely to influence Congress.
Trucking industry lobbyists have the kind of access to decision-makers that safety advocates can only imagine. Among FedEx lobbyists alone, 37 of 51 previously worked in government, according to CRP.
Those influence brokers have been exceptionally busy and effective, securing victories onapnea screening in 2013 and the roll-back of sleep rules in 2014. In 2015, they aimed for much more. In the House, industry-friendly lawmakers were persuaded to add several policy riders to the annual transportation funding bill for 2016 in May, again bypassing committees and hearings, as Sen. Collins did with sleep rules.
Bigger And More Dangerous
Perhaps the most controversial of those measures was a scheme to take away the ability of states to set their own standards for the maximum lengths of double trailers. A federal law passed in 1982 required all states to allow doubles, with each of those trailers up to 28 feet long. Many states, particularly in the West, allow longer trailers. The new measure would have raised the federal limit to 33 feet for each trailer, and forced all states to accept them.
Companies such as FedEx and UPS have long sought to extend the length of trailers, because they often fill the 28-foot model with packages before hitting the80,000-pound weight limit. Carrying more with each rig means greater efficiency, lower cost and more profit.
But larger, heavier trucks also mean more wear and tear on highways and bridges that are already poorly maintained. Weigh stations and other facilities handling trucks would also need to be renovated and expanded, often at taxpayers’ expense.
Law enforcement and safety advocates also warn that double trailers are already more dangerous than regular semis, with an 11 percent higher crash fatality rate.
“From a safety perspective, double 33-foot trailers are basically a disaster,” said Robert Mills, a Fort Worth, Texas, police officer who spent 13 years as a roadside safety inspector and is a member of the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee, which recommends rules to the federal government.
Many truckers are not so pleased with the giant double trailers either, dubbing them “wiggle wagons” and “widow makers.” Some haulers, including the smaller conglomerates Swift and Knight, joined with the Coalition Against Bigger Trucks to oppose their larger brethren’s push to extend trailer lengths.
Even crashes of doubles where there are no injuries in the initial impact leave dangerous scenes for other drivers when they’re sprawled out across multiple lanes of traffic, said Balder, who is now working with the coalition.
But CERT, the coalition of shippers, is determined to get approval for larger trucks, and was behind a push in 2012 requiring the Department of Transportation to study the impacts of size and weight increases. The industry coalition believed, or at least argued, that those impacts would be negligible; research proving that would help their case. But before that study was even completed, the coalition got its provision allowing longer trucks added to the House’s version of the 2016 transportation spending bill. The DOT study, released in June 2015 two weeks after the House released the transportation bill, recommended against allowing larger trucks, saying the safety issues remained unresolved.
Handout
Lisa Shrum lost her mother and stepfather, Virginia and Randy Baker, when their car was torn in half at an accident where a double-trailer blocked the road.
There were several other industry requests in that funding bill for 2016, including a measure that aimed to extend the suspension of sleep rules that Collins had won just six months earlier. Her suspension lasted a year and required regulators to look into the effectiveness of requiring two nights of sleep and whether there was any case for the trucking industry’s position. But rather than see that process through, the new provision changed the study mid-stream and called for gathering even more data — including the regulation’s impact on the longevity of drivers. Studying workers’ lifespans, of course, takes entire lifespans. That provision was signed into law with the 2016 spending bill that ultimately passed.
“They just basically want to stall this forever,” said Rep. David Price (N.C.), the top Democrat on the appropriations subcommittee that deals with transportation.
Another measure the industry pushed last year aimed to short-circuit federal regulators’ efforts to evaluate raising insurance requirements for trucking companies. Currently, carriers have to maintain the same $750,000 policies they did in the ‘80s. The industry’s argument is that independent operators would not be able to afford higher premiums — and indeed, DND’s margins were so close it shut down when its insurance company raised rates after the Balder crash. The industry argues that 99 percent of truck accidents do not generate such high damages. But $750,000 doesn’t begin to cover the costs a serious semi wreck incurs. For instance, a widower whose wife was killed and children severely injured by a dozing driver in 2010 won $41 million in damages. The family of James McNair, the comedian who died in the Tracy Morgan crash, settled for $10 million in March last year. A somewhat weakened version of the measure did pass, requiring regulators to evaluate a number of different factors before they adjust the insurance requirements.
Another industry-backed provision aimed to hide the BASIC safety measurements for trucking companies from public view, and bar their use in lawsuits. The lawsuit provision was dropped from the spending bill during negotiations, but the BASIC scores were in fact hidden and removed from the agency’s website. The industry used a Government Accountability Office study that found the safety system could do better in some respects to justify its position, but the two firms involved in the Velasquez crash had exactly the sort of poor safety scores that the BASIC system predicts make them more likely to be involved in accidents.
Despite the fact that these provisions will likely have an impact on the safety of nearly 11 million large trucks registered in America, they were all buried in legislation that Congress had to pass to avoid a government shutdown, with little to no debate about whether they were a good idea.
“The advocates of relaxing the rules or eliminating the rules, they see that and think this is their train to catch. … Not just wait on the normal process, or count on something as pedestrian as actual hearings or discussion, but to make a summary judgement and latch it on to an appropriations bill,” Price said.
There’s something else all the industry-backed measures have in common: They are deeply unpopular.
The Huffington Post and YouGov surveyed Americans on four of the proposals the industry has been pursuing through the backdoor: teen drivers, longer trucks, heavier trucks, and the relaxed hours-of-service rules. In every case, respondents to the survey opposed the moves — by large margins.
Indeed, when proposals to weaken trucking safety do get a up-or-down vote on their own, they generally fail. When the Senate’s version of the transportation funding bill came up for debate in November and October, an attempt to include the House’s requirement for states to accept 33-foot trailers across the nation was voted down each time. Similarly, an attempt in the House last November to amend the highway construction bill to hike truck weight limits failed convincingly, 187 to 236.
The trucking industry is certainly still trying, though. The backdoor approach is the easiest way for the industry to get around the safety restrictions that most Americans support. One initiative that it backed down on in 2015 was a bid to block states from enforcing regulations on rest and pay that are tougher than the federal government’s. Large haulers got the preemption added to the House’s highway construction bill, but couldn’t get senators to consent.
The trucking industry is back at it this year, adding a provision that would override state rest and overtime pay rules to a House bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration, which is currently operating on a stopgap measure that expires in mid-July. The Senate is working on a dramatically different version of that bill, which almost guarantees a situation where trucking lobbyists have thrived — a rush to finish a must-pass bill behind closed doors with a looming deadline and little ability to alter deeply buried provisions.
A Problem He Can’t Forget
For Douglas Balder, crashes are not just a byproduct of business and politics. His own near-fatal encounter is burned into his flesh and his memory.
While he can’t forget it, he also doesn’t want to. He’s read most of the 5,000-page NTSB investigation of his crash, and he still looks at the pictures of his destroyed squad car every couple of weeks. He said he doesn’t know why he wants to keep replaying that night.
“I’ve been asked that question before, and I can’t answer it,” he said.
But he does have an answer, really.
Balder joined the Navy reserves right after graduating high school in 1994 and has served tours overseas, including in Iraq and North Africa. He is the sort of person who walks in the St. Jude’s parade and donates blood. And he now has another reason to keep trying — a third child who was conceived and born after he was nearly killed on the side of that highway.
“We all take an oath to make things better in the long run,” he said. “And it’s got to be our focus now. I could easily have shriveled up in a ball and stayed at home and wasted away, but that’s not my mindset. That’s the military in me: You gotta move on — pick up and move on — and try to make a difference for the future. And I have to remind myself of what happened.”
A highway worker was providing traffic control with an arrow board in the back of a pick-up truck when he was struck by the truck. The semi sideswiped the truck and then rolled onto its side. Fortunately, no one was injured in this crash.
We wanted to bring your attention to this crash because it is National Work Zone Awareness Week. Even though large trucks constitute 5 percent of the registered vehicles in the U.S., 30 percent of fatal work zone crashes involve a large truck. Too many work zone crashes occur because the truck driver cannot stop his/her vehicle in time, which is why TSC promotes collision avoidance and automatic braking on large trucks.
In Michigan, two road workers were installing a highway sign at 5 p.m when a they were struck by a truck. The big rig crossed the white fog line into the work zone, killing one of the workers and injuring the other. The semi-truck driver was charged with reckless driving causing a death.
It is National Work Zone Awareness Week, and this fatal and injurious crash serves as a grave reminder that more must be done to ensure safety on our roads for the men and women that help fix and build them. Large trucks are involved in 30 percent of all fatal work zone crashes. TSC will continue supporting a federal mandate for forward collision avoidance mitigation braking on large trucks, and continue opposing efforts to allow Double 33s, which have a 22 foot longer stopping distance that existing double (28-foot) tractor trailers.
After stepping off of the school bus and crossing the street, 10 year old, Olivia Walter, was struck by a box truck. Despite another motorist stopping and waving her to cross the street, a box truck that was approaching from the other lane hit her on the right side. The girl sustained a fractured bone above her eye and bruises and road rash on the right side of her body. TSC supports collision avoidance technologies that require automatic braking, which may have prevented this truck from hitting this girl.
A new version of the AP Stylebook will be available on June 1, 2016. One of the notable changes this year is the guidance the book offers on when to call a collision an “accident.” According to two tweets from AP Stylebook, “when negligence is claimed or proven, [journalists should] avoid accident, which can be read as exonerating the person,” and “instead, use crash, collision or other terms.” TSC welcomes this effort to change the conversation about crashes, but we are disappointed that “accident” still remains the default word. We will continue supporting efforts to Drop the ‘A’ Word and push for “crash or collision” to be the default word used by journalists.
On April 4, 2016 at approximately 4:35 a.m., three adults traveling on Military Highway in a van pulled over to the side of the freeway to change a flat tire when a large dump crashed into them. One adult, identified as Lorena Kelly, died at the scene and the other two adults were taken to the hospital with serious injuries.
The truck driver of the dump truck was also taken to the hospital, but with minor injuries. The accident is under investigation.
The current federal weight limit for a large interstate truck is 80,000 pounds, but for some states, there are exemptions and permits allowing even heavier trucks to travel on our roadways. Bigger, heavier trucks are more likely to be in a crash, more likely to cause damage to our roads and bridges, and more likely to result in an injury or death.
On March 31, 2016 at approximately 4:40 p.m., James Peagler, 80 and his sister, Jonell Peagler Weatherly, 78 were driving a Toyota SUV in South Carolina when they pulled onto U.S. 601 after stopping at the stop sign on Community Road.
A tractor trailer truck traveling south on U.S. 601 collided into the SUV causing the two victims to be trapped in the vehicle. Both victims died at the scene.
The truck driver was not injured. The crash is under investigation by the South Carolina Highway Patrol.
The current federal weight limit for a large interstate truck is 80,000 pounds, but for some states, there are exemptions and permits allowing even heavier trucks to travel on our roadways. Bigger, heavier trucks are more likely to be in a crash, more likely to cause damage to our roads and bridges, and more likely to result in an injury or death.
On April 4, 2016, at approximately 8:35 p.m., Lance C. Ringhaver was driving an Infinity Q705 south in the center lane on U.S. Highway 41 in Apollo Beach when it came upon a tractor-trailer, blocking the roadway. The truck driver attempted to make a left turn north of U.S. Highway 41, but failed to make a complete turn when Ringhaver crashed into the tractor trailer truck and his car was wedged underneath. Mr. Ringhaver died at the scene.
The truck driver, identified as Isbel Perez Guzman was not injured, but was cited for failing to yield the right of way.
Trucks with weak underride guards, or none at all, offer little to no protection for motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians who can possibly crash into the sides or rear of a truck and trailer. Rear underride guards are required on many trucks and trailers, but the standard is antiquated and ineffective in preventing underride crashes from becoming injurious or fatal. Overall, more than 4,000 people are killed in truck crashes every year in the United States and a portion of the preventable fatal crashes involve underride.
On April 3, 2016, in the middle of the afternoon, Jacqueline Sanchez, 21, was driving a Toyota Camry southbound on the New Jersey, Woodbridge Turnpike when she crashed into the back of a disabled tractor trailer truck that was stopped in the right-hand lane. Sanchez was pronounced dead at the scene.
New Jersey State Trooper, Lawrence Peebles confirmed that the tractor trailer truck was not pulled over off the road and remained in the far right traveling lane. It is not clear why the truck did not pull off the road entirely. The truck driver was not injured and the crash is under investigation by the New Jersey State Police.
Trucks with weak underride guards, or none at all, offer little to no protection for motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians who can possibly crash into the sides or rear of a truck and trailer. Rear underride guards are required on many trucks and trailers, but the standard is antiquated and ineffective in preventing underride crashes from becoming injurious or fatal. Overall, more than 4,000 people are killed in truck crashes every year in the United States and a portion of the preventable fatal crashes involve underride.
Where: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Vehicle Research Center in Ruckersville, VA
Please join us as researchers, government officials and industry leaders gather to discuss truck underride crashes and how to reduce the risks for passenger vehicle occupants. We will explore the scope of the problem and how regulation and voluntary action can help address it. In a crash test, IIHS researchers will demonstrate how underride protection has already improved. The full agenda and additional details will follow in the coming weeks.
Please RSVP to Chamelle Matthew at cmatthew@iihs.org or 703.247.1530
HOTEL INFORMATION
Rooms have been reserved for the night of May 4, 2016, at these Charlottesville hotels:
Omni – IIHS room rate: $199
Cut-off date to make reservation: Sunday, March 20, 2016;
located at 212 Ridge McIntire Rd, Charlottesville, VA 22903.
Hyatt Place – IIHS room rate: $109
Cut-off date to make reservation: Wednesday, April 20, 2016;
located at 2100 Bond Street, Charlottesville, Virginia, 22901.
The roundtable is being organized and sponsored by
IIHS, the Truck Safety Coalition and Annaleah & Mary for Truck Safety
Several “concerned employees” working for the Tennessee Department of Transportation sent an anonymous letter to the state’s DOT commissioner, which prompted an investigation that unearthed troubling information. Public records indicate that the state’s snow plow and salt truck drivers were on the road for upwards of 60 hours consecutively during and after several snow storms that occurred this year. Even though Federal laws exempts these drivers from Hours of Service rules during inclement weather so that the roads are cleared for first responders, the Tennessee DOT’s exploitation of this loophole is egregious. Lawmakers must do more to ensure that unsafe, tired truckers are on not the roads, especially in Tennessee where fatigue played a role in over 1,600 crashes last year.
Since the 2011 Hours of Service rules were first announced by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in December 2011, the trucking industry has launched annual attacks trying to weaken these regulations. That same year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also announced comprehensive changes to rules governing pilot scheduling. Interestingly, there was much less push back from those in the aviation industry to limit the amount of hours a pilot can work.
The FAA rule changes are based on scientific research and data regarding circadian rhythms. The FAA also limited flight time – when the plane is moving under its own power before, during, or after flight – to 8 or 9 hours depending on the start time of the pilot’s entire flight duty period. Additionally, the rule addresses potential cumulative fatigue by placing weekly and 28-day limits on the amount of time a pilot may be assigned to any type of flight duty.
As a result of the FAA’s updates, commercial pilots seldom experience a 14-hour workday, which is not the case for many truckers. Given that the odds of dying in a traffic accident is 1 in 14,000, while there is only a 1 in 4.7 million chance of dying on a commercial flight, it is surprising that more people do not share our sense of urgency in needing to address the amount of hours truckers can work daily, weekly, and monthly.
It is unfortunate that there has been so much pushback from the trucking industry to embrace much-needed regulations that will prevent fatigue-related truck crash deaths and injuries. TSC will continue to defend HOS rules to ensure that truck drivers are adequately rested so that driving a truck becomes as safe as flying a plane.
Last week, a dump truck towing a Bobcat bulldozer rear ended a minivan, causing it to collide into a tractor in front of it. Consequently, the minivan was destroyed and a 42 year-old high school English teacher was killed.
Unfortunately, this fatal crash could have prevented by commonsense proposals that TSC has been promoting for years. Adopting forward collision avoidance and mitigation (F-CAM) technology could have prevented this crash, or at least mitigated the severity of it. Establishing a drug clearinghouse database would have also possibly prevented the crash. The driver of the dump truck, who had a history of driving violations as well as two pending drug charges, should not have been behind the wheel of this truck.
J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., (NASDAQ:JBHT) one of the largest transportation logistics companies in North America, announced today that it recently ordered 4,000 Wabash National DuraPlate® dry van trailers that include the new RIG-16 Rear Underride Guard System. This new rear impact guard is engineered to prevent underride in multiple offset, or overlap, impact scenarios. The guard reduces the risk of injury or death for individuals involved in an accident with the rear of a trailer.
“At J.B. Hunt, we value safety above all else,” said John Roberts, President and Chief Executive Officer of J.B. Hunt Transport, Inc. “We applaud Wabash National’s leadership and advancements in rear impact protection, and we’re proud to be the first fleet to specify the new rear impact guard design.”
The rear impact guard is made of advanced, high-strength steel. It includes two additional vertical posts and a longer, reinforced bumper tube. This design will better absorb the impact should any part of the bumper become engaged in a collision. Additionally, the guard is formulated to resist corrosion.
The Truck Safety Coalition commends companies that take a proactive approach to promoting safety through smart purchasing decisions. Truck Safety Coalition volunteer and underride advocate Nancy Mueleners said, “I am glad that J.B. Hunt is equipping their trailers with an improved rear guard. Introductions of rear guards using new engineering approaches are a much-needed safety improvement that will prevent injuries and save lives.”
Production of units specifically for J.B. Hunt began in January. Wabash National formally unveiled this new technology at the American Trucking Associations’ Technology and Maintenance Council annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee last month.
About J.B. Hunt J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., a Fortune 500 and S&P 500 Company, focuses on providing safe and reliable transportation services to a diverse group of customers throughout the contiguous United States, Canada and Mexico. Utilizing an integrated, multimodal approach, the company provides capacity-oriented solutions centered on delivering customer value and industry-leading service. J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. stock trades on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol JBHT and is a component of the Dow Jones Transportation Average. J.B. Hunt Transport, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of JBHT. For more information, visit www.jbhunt.com.
A coal truck driver crossed the center line and sideswiped a pickup truck, causing it to flip over. Then, the coal truck continued driving and struck a Nissan Maxima, killing the driver and the passenger of the car. The truck driver was eventually arrested after he was located at a nearby hospital. These crashes should have never happened given the that coal truck driver was operating with a suspended/revoked CDL. TSC promotes enhancing enforcement efforts to ensure drivers like this are prevented from operating trucks and jeopardizing public safety.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued an out-of-service order to Bar D Bar Trucking. The agency ordered the motor carrier to cease operations after an investigators found violations including:
Failing to conduct pre-employment background checks on drivers
Failing to ensure drivers were qualified before dispatching them
Failing to properly monitor drivers to ensure compliance with hours-of-service requirements
Failing to conduct random drug and alcohol tests on drivers
Using a driver who tested positive for a controlled substance
Failing to ensure its vehicles were regularly inspected, maintained and repaired and that they met minimum safety standards
Additionally, the FMCSA also found that the company’s owner-operator was driving without a valid commercial driver’s license and is subject to a lifetime CDL disqualification.
TSC supports the regulation of legal Schedule II prescription drugs, in particular, those which list drowsiness and fatigue as side-effects. We also support monitoring or eliminating the use of any substance that impairs cognitive or motor ability for operators of commercial motor vehicles.
Volvo issued a recall for nearly 16,000 trucks due to a defect caused by the steering shaft missing a pin. Because these defective vehicles are likely to cause a crash or break down, the FMCSA has ordered inspectors to perform Level IV inspections and place any unrepaired truck out-of-service. Truck drivers operating these trucks may subject to civil penalties or criminal prosecution, but being placed out-of-service will not affect a carrier’s Safety Measurement System (SMS) score. TSC encourages a swift response, like this one, to reduce the dangers that could be caused by a defective truck.
An overweight dump truck failed to yield at a roundabout, crossed over the center median, and struck a tractor-trailer. While it is fortunate that neither driver was injured, it is unfortunate that the dump truck driver was allowed to operate given his blatant disregard of the law. Aside from disobeying traffic laws, the dump truck driver also failed to follow the rules governing trucking. The State Police Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Unit found that the dump truck’s brakes were out of adjustment and that the truck was five tons too heavy. TSC supports stronger commercial motor vehicle enforcement to identify and remove truck drivers who disregard safety and imperil the public.
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disease afflicting at least 25 million adults in the U.S., and, if left untreated, will continue to be a pervasive threat to truck safety. According to a recent study on truck drivers with OSA, treatment is key in reducing their crash risks. One particularly effective method for treating OSA is the use of positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy. Results of the study show that the rate of serious, preventable crashes was five times higher among truck drivers with OSA who failed to adhere to PAP therapy, compared with matched controls. This study reaffirms TSC’s position that requiring comprehensive sleep apnea screening for commercial vehicle drivers will reduce fatigue-related crashes.
Two people were killed in Knox County, Maine last week after a tractor-trailer crossed the center line, corrected, fishtailed, rolled, and then took out four cars. It is still unclear as to what caused the driver cross lanes and overcorrect, but this is consistent with issues such as fatigue and distracted driving. Technologies like electronic stability control, lane departure warnings, and forward collision avoidance and mitigation braking systems would reduce the chances of these truck crashes as well as the severity of a crash. TSC will continue our education efforts with Members of Congress on the need to mandate these proven technologies.
The Department of Transportation recently announced that two long overdue truck safety rules have been further delayed. The rule to require speed limiters on heavy-duty trucks is projected to be published on April 22. The Final Rule for a CDL Clearinghouse, which will develop a database of truck drivers who have failed a drug or alcohol test, is projected to be published on July 28. TSC is disappointed with the delays and will continue monitoring the progress of these regulations.
Following the passage of the FAST Act, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) was prohibited from posting a carrier’s performance scores compiled under its Safety Management System (SMS) as well as the comparative scores among carriers. Upon making the required changes to become compliant with the new law, the agency restored the raw data the agency uses to compile safety scores for its Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) initiative to its website. Publishing the raw data, once again, is beneficial to public safety and the right thing to do. The scores are collected by taxpayer-funded law enforcement officers on tax-payer-funded roads.
The National Academy of Sciences released a report recommending how the FMCSA could improve its research and data collection efforts pertaining to the relationship between commercial motor vehicle (CMV) driver fatigue and crashes. The study identifies obstacles to researching the link between fatigue and crashes, such as the inability to objectively measure fatigue and the difficulty of determining if drivers are actually resting during their mandated time-off. The study also acknowledged that commercial driver fatigue contributes to between 10 and 20 percent of the nearly 4,000 annual CMV crash fatalities. The NAS report, if utilized properly, will help the FMCSA improve their analysis of truck and bus driver fatigue moving forward. The report can be downloaded by clicking on the link below and following the instructions on the following page.
I became involved in the Truck Safety Coalition after my father, Bill Badger, was killed in 2004 near the Georgia state line by a tired trucker who had fallen asleep at the wheel after driving all night and crashed into his car.
The Michigan House of Representatives just passed an anti-truck safety bill, House Bill 4418, that would grant an exemption to seasonal weight restrictions, also known as the “frost law,” for trucks carrying maple sap.
As the president of the Truck Safety Coalition (TSC), I have educated myself and others about different policies affecting truck safety for more than ten years. At the same time, I have advocated for laws that would enhance truck safety and defended existing truck safety laws and regulations from being rolled back. I hope that others will join me and TSC in this opportunity to stand up for safety and protect a law that protects the people by opposing HB 4418.
Granting yet another exemption to Michigan’s “frost law” contradicts the original intent of the law. Seasonal weight limits, which reduce weight limits on maximum axle loads, maximum wheel loads and gross vehicle weights for commercial motor vehicles driven on state roads from March until May were established to protect our state’s infrastructure. Because of the freezing and thawing that occurs during the aforementioned months, the roads become far more susceptible to damage caused by heavy vehicles. Therefore, allowing heavier trucks carrying maple sap during these months will result in more road damage, in turn costing the taxpayers even more.
HB 4418 also ignores Michigan’s subpar infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers found 22 percent of Michigan roads are in poor condition and 28 percent of Michigan bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Lawmakers should not be enacting this exception that will further exacerbate Michigan’s crumbling roads and bridges.
Additionally, one of the arguments for HB 4418 is based on the erroneous claim that heavier trucks will result in fewer trucks. Increasing the truck weight limit will not decrease the number of trips, result in fewer miles traveled, or improve safety by reducing the number of trucks on the highways. Despite several increases in weights of large trucks over the past few decades, the number of trucks and miles traveled on U.S. highways has consistently gone up.
The number of fatalities as a result of truck crashes in Michigan has also grown. From 2011 to 2014, total fatalities from all crashes in Michigan increased by just 1.3 percent, while fatalities from truck crashes in our state increased by 61 percent during that same time. Clearly, truck safety in our state, like infrastructure, is worsening. Michigan lawmakers must address this problem, but allowing heavier trucks is not the solution.
Bills, like this one, that increase truck weight limits industry-by-industry are nothing more than a back door strategy by special interests to come back to our state legislature in several years and lobby for heavier truck weights statewide. We should not allow this special interest hand out to pass at the expense of our infrastructure and our safety.
Dawn King is the president of the Truck Safety Coalition (TSC), a nonprofit that is a partnership between the Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH) and Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT).
On Wednesday, March 9th, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrations (FMCSA) and Federal Rail Administration’s (FRA) issued an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) regarding sleep apnea. The agencies will collect data and information concerning the potential consequences for safety presented by truck drivers with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea. The agencies will be accepting public comments 89 days; the comment period ends on 06/08/2016. TSC will be commenting in support of this rulemaking.
Truck driver’s wages have effectively been cut by almost a third since deregulation in the 1980s. The low pay coupled with lax hours of service regulations are contributing reasons for the trucking industry’s high turn-over rates. TSC promotes changing truck driver pay structure as it will improve safety by reducing the pressure on truck drivers to engage in unsafe work practices to meet unrealistic schedules.
A tractor trailer became wedged underneath a bridge after the driver attempted to pass through it. The crash caused debris to be scattered on the road, which led to more than three hours of traffic. While there were no injuries or fatalities as a result of this reckless driver’s actions, property damage only crashes should not be ignored. These crashes create traffic, which results in productivity loss, and cause damage to our country’s crumbling roads and bridges, which are repaired using taxpayer dollars.
The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) published today in the Federal Register requiring training for entry-level commercial motor vehicle drivers is a welcome development in the effort to enhance truck safety. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) release of the NPRM, which is based upon the negotiated rulemaking conducted by the Entry Level Driver Training Advisory Committee (ELDTAC), comes 25 years after Congress passed a law requiring a rule on entry level driver training. While we are disappointed that this commonsense regulation has been stalled for so long, the Truck Safety Coalition looks forward to the safety benefits it will produce.
Ron Wood, a member of the ELDTAC and Truck Safety Coalition volunteer said, “This regulation will greatly enhance safety for truckers and the motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclist they drive alongside. Requiring commercial driver’s license applicants to train using a specific curriculum and behind-the-wheel training before they can attain a CDL will help make sure that new truck drivers are prepared to operate their vehicles. The theoretical component mandates training on fatigue awareness, hours of service, trip planning, operating a vehicle under various conditions, and several other safety issues that a professional truck driver needs to address. The requisite 30 hours of behind-the-wheel training will further ensure that CDL applicants can translate their theoretical knowledge into practice for what they may encounter on our nation’s roads and bridges.”
“Although I am eager that this rulemaking will lead to more well-trained drivers, this achievement is bittersweet as it comes too late for some of us.” Wood said. “In 2004, my mother, my sister, and her three children were killed by an inadequately trained driver who fell asleep at the wheel; he killed a total of ten people and injured two others in this crash that occurred 13 years after Congress required action on entry level driver training.”
John Lannen, Executive Director of the Truck Safety Coalition and also a member of the ELDTAC noted, “This negotiated rulemaking is a step in the right direction, but I would be remiss if I did not recognize the delay since the Congressional mandate was issued in the early nineties. Nevertheless, the Truck Safety Coalition is pleased to see that the FMCSA proceeded with the rulemaking that the advisory committee reached through consensus. Aside from the theoretical curricula and behind-the-wheel hourly requirements, there are other much needed safety improvements included in this rulemaking. Establishing standards for FMCSA-approved driver-training providers and a registry of those providers will help the agency ensure that this rulemaking is properly enforced. The Truck Safety Coalition will continue to monitor this NPRM moving forward, and will also continue applying pressure to make sure that this rulemaking becomes a Final Rule as quickly as possible.”
The Truck Safety Coalition (www.trucksafety.org) is a partnership between Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH) and Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT). The Truck Safety Coalition is dedicated to reducing the number of deaths and injuries caused by truck-related crashes, providing compassionate support to truck crash survivors and families of truck crash victims, and educating public policy-makers and media about truck safety issues.
A nine-month long investigation by the Nebraska State Patrol Carrier Enforcement Division uncovered one motor carrier’s blatant disregard for state weight limits. Mr. Bult’s Inc (MBI), the carrier, had more than 2,000 occurrences of their vehicles exceeding Nebraska’s weight limits. If not for concerned citizens and committed trooper, this bad actor might still be breaking the law and endangering the public. TSC will continue to promote commercial vehicle enforcement efforts and oppose increases to weight limits.
After failing to stop for a mandatory commercial vehicle safety check in Vermont, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) pulled over a truck driver and found multiple safety violations. The driver had not properly kept a record of duty, and the company he works for, J&M Transport LLC did not have the requisite operating authority. The police also found marijuana, methamphetamines, and paraphernalia that was presumably used by the driver to consume these substances. The Truck Safety Coalition will continue working to remove bad actors, like this truck driver, from operating on roads and endangering the public.
A truck driver, who was driving more than 20mph over the speed limit (76 mph), crashed and died in Maryland last week. According to the police, the driver veered into the shoulder of the road and lost control of the vehicle; consequently, the vehicle overturned into the guardrail before skidding approximately 300 feet. This crash should serve as a reminder to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the dire need for the heavy vehicle speed limiter rule. TSC has been working for more than ten years for this rule to be released, and we will continue to urge NHTSA to issue this rulemaking that will slow down reckless truck drivers.
Senator Boxer forcefully opposed Section 611 of the Aviation Innovation, Reform, and Reauthorization (AIRR) Act, a provision that would preempt the laws of more than 20 states and restrict states from enacting laws governing truck drivers’ meal and rest breaks that go beyond the federal standard. Senator Boxer noted that this “poison pill” provision will prevent the AIRR Act from moving forward in the Senate. She also stated that she will “use all the tools at [her] disposal to ensure that [Section 611] is not included in the FAA or any other legislation,” and that “this terrible anti-safety, anti-worker provision… has no place in any bill, which is why [the Senate] killed it in the highway bill.”
TSC supports the sentiments expressed by Senator Boxer, and we are thankful that we can count on her to stand up for truck safety in Congress.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) sent a letter telling the FMCSA to remove and limit the number of exemptions the agency grants. The CVSA argues that FMCSA is granting excessive exemptions, which hinder enforcement efforts by creating inconsistency and confusion. TSC has been and continues to be firmly opposed to state or industry exemptions for this very reason. We support the CVSA’s stance on this issue, and also urge the FMCSA to reconsider and reduce the many exemptions it grants to carriers, particularly those pertaining to training and hours of service.
This article shines a light on the issue of chameleon carriers, which are companies that have gone out of business and the owners have started up a new business under another name. These carriers are able to exist because the minimum insurance requirement is so low that insurance companies do not do any underwriting at that level. These companies also typically have minimal owned assets, and lease their terminals/equipment or otherwise leverage their operations. Even if an injured person obtains a legal judgment in excess of the low insurance limits, these carriers just reincarnate once again. TSC will continue to advocate for an increased enforcement in pursuing these rogue companies and for an increase in the minimum insurance for motor carriers, which will help prevent these reckless companies from being allowed back on our roads.
Wabash National Corporation, a leading manufacturer of commercial trucking equipment, announced that it will be introducing a new rear impact guard for trailers. As TSC noted in our comments on NHTSA’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to address underride protection in light vehicle crashes into the rear of trailers and semitrailers, this is just one example of available technology that highlights how woefully inadequate the agency’s safety standards are for trucking. Currently, NHTSA is proposing to enhance the U.S. standard by adopting the Canadian standard for rear underride guards and protections. While we welcome improvements to safety, we also noted that NHTSA’s NPRM would be a meaningless move and a missed opportunity to actually advance truck safety. Not only did the agency determine that 93 percent of new trailers meet or exceed the proposed Canadian standard, but as Wabash notes in this article, it has been producing rear impact guards that exceed the Canadian standard since 2007. TSC appreciates the Wabash improved guards and we will continue to educate the public about the dangers of underride crashes, like passenger compartment intrusion (PCI), as well as how improved underride guards and protections can prevent PCI at higher speed and/or overlap crashes between light vehicles and trailers.
The citizens of Elwood, Illinois, fed up with their community being overrun by heavy truck traffic and fearful of being needlessly injured or killed, formed Safe Roads Illinois to address the problems contributing to their untenable situation. As a result of their advocacy efforts, they recently scored a big win in their endeavors to enhance truck safety in their village and the surrounding county. The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) announced plans to install a traffic light at an intersection because so many trucks have driven into a cemetery and damaged veterans’ graves.
TSC welcomes the traffic light as it enhances safety and prevents the desecration of veterans’ graves. The effort to improve truck safety is ongoing and occurs at many levels. For example, the FMCSA should also require entry-level driver training to ensure that truck drivers know how to properly operate their vehicle and are sufficiently knowledgeable about negotiating all routes.
As you may remember, one of the anti-truck-safety provisions that was included in the Omnibus Appropriations bill authorized Idaho to increase the truck weight limit on their roads from 105,500-lbs to 129,000-lbs. In order for this truck weight increase to take effect, the Idaho state legislature must pass a bill, which must then be signed by their governor. Several days ago, their State Senate passed such a bill, and it is now heading to the Idaho House of Representatives. Even though there are state groups that are opposing this measure, like the Idaho Walk Bike Alliance and Friends of Clearwater, the measure will likely pass.
TSC firmly opposes legislation to increase truck weight limits state-by-state as it is merely a back door attempt by trucking interests to come back to Congress in a few years and push for heavier truck weights nationwide.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recently concluded their investigation into a 2014 fatal truck crash in Naperville, IL and found the truck driver, the carrier, and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to all be at fault.
At the time of the crash the truck driver had only slept 4½ hours in the preceding 37 hours. Investigators also found that the trucker routinely falsified his paper logbook in order to circumvent the hours of service requirements. As a result of driving tired, the trucker failed to stop in time, despite ample warnings, and needlessly killed and injured several people. TSC anticipates that the Final Rule for Electronic Logging Devices will prevent drivers like this from falsifying their logbooks, in turn reducing truck driver fatigue.
The motor carrier, DND International Inc., was classified as a “high risk” carrier, but was still allowed to operate. The “high risk” motor carrier failed to comply with federal regulations, particularly hours of service requirements, and should have either fixed the problem or been put out of service.
While the motor carrier should have done more, this crash also highlights deficiency in the FMCSA’s enforcement efforts. It was not until two months after the fatal crash that the FMCSA designated DND International Inc. as an “imminent danger”. Even worse, after the FMCSA’s declaration that they were an “imminent danger,” the company successfully appealed that and once again resumed operations. It was not until the motor carrier’s insurance company cancelled its coverage that this dangerous company was forced off the road.
This tragic crash underscores many of the reasons we work to make trucking safer. TSC will continue educating the public and our lawmakers about fatigued driving, weak Federal oversight, and how increasing minimum insurance requirements can lead to more insurers, like in this case, refusing to cover such an unsafe business.
Yesterday, the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure voted to approve the Aviation Innovation, Reform, and Reauthorization (AIRR) Act. As you know, this federal aviation bill includes a provision that adversely impacts truck safety. Section 611 would preempt the laws of more than 20 states and would restrict states from enacting laws governing truck drivers’ meal and rest breaks that go beyond the federal standard. Unfortunately, an amendment offered by Rep. Grace Napolitano, which would have removed Section 611, failed by a vote of 27-31. We are thankful for her efforts as well as for the support of Reps Nadler (D-NY) and Norton (D-DC). We will keep you updated about the status of this provision and let you what you can do to help remove it.
Side underride guards are a simple improvement that can make large trucks safer for pedestrians and cyclists by physically covering the cavity between the front and rear wheels of the truck. Given that nearly half of bicyclists and more than one quarter of pedestrians killed by a large truck first impact the side of a truck, TSC will continue to advocate for these safety enhancements on all interstate single unit trucks and trailers. Please watch this video from the British Safety Council (below) that illustrates the dangers of trucks’ blind spots and underscores why these side protections would reduce the instances of side impact truck crashes with pedestrians and bicyclists that result in needless fatalities and injuries.
On Wednesday, February 3rd, The Office of Management and Budget cleared the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrations (FMCSA) and Federal Rail Administration’s (FRA) joint advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) regarding sleep apnea. The FMCSA and FRA are collecting data and information concerning the prevalence of moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea among individuals occupying safety sensitive positions in highway transportation. The agencies also request information about the potential economic impact and safety benefits associated with regulatory actions that would result in transportation workers in these positions, who exhibit multiple risk factors for obstructive sleep apnea, undergoing evaluation by a healthcare professional with expertise in sleep disorders and subsequent treatment.
The TSC supports rulemaking for sleep apnea screening to ensure medical examiners are testing for and monitoring this fatigue related condition. We will continue working with Wanda Lindsay and the John Lindsay Foundation to promote public awareness of the sleep apnea problem in the commercial motor vehicle industry. We invite you to see the good work they are doing to improve truck safety by clicking here.
A list of the best and worst places in the U.S. to own a trucking company or drive a truck was recently published in the American Journal of Transportation. The list is based on the responses of nearly 4,000 individuals involved in the trucking industry. Respondents were asked about the cost of overnight parking, trucking-related fees, and how friendly states were to drivers. Unfortunately, this list of “best” states (Tennessee, Washington, Oklahoma, Texas, and Indiana) to be a truck driver did not factor in safety.
According to the most recent FARS data, each of these five states saw fatal crashes increase between 2009 and 2014 that exceeded the national increase of 15 percent. Additionally, in 2009 these five states accounted for 19 percent of the total fatal crashes in the United States, and in 2014 they accounted for 25 percent of the total fatal crashes in the United States. Safety should be a key factor in determining the best states to be a truck driver, especially given the fact that between 2009 and 2014, truck driver fatalities skyrocketed 38 percent. TSC is committed to educating the public and advocating for commonsense safety reforms in order to making trucking safer for everyone, including truck drivers.
The people of Will County, Illinois are fighting to make truck safety a priority in their community. Heavy truck traffic resulting from unplanned, overdeveloped intermodal facilities in the area has overrun their community, creating an unsafe roads. Since 2014, Will County has experienced 20 truck crash fatalities, 156 truck crash injuries, and 909 truck crashes. As we all know, just one crash is too many, but nearly 1,000 crashes in the span of a year in one county is not just a tragedy, it is an epidemic.
The Will County Coalition for the People and Safe Roads Illinois were formed because the people in that area have realized that development is occurring so quickly that is leaving safety behind. In other words, the situations has become untenable. As a result, the coalition has created this list of advocacy items:
Encouraging smart, sensible, diverse and planned development
Making our roads and communities safe
Protecting our air and water
Holding developers accountable for their actions and impacts
Growing travel and tourism
Protecting our property value
The Truck Safety Coalition supports the endeavors of these local organizations, and we will continue to monitor their progress and update you on their accomplishments. We have long recognized the social, environmental, and financial costs of an unregulated trucking sector, which benefits the few at the expense of the many. We will continue our efforts to make trucking safer so that other towns, villages, and counties are not faced with a situation like this one where they are forced to allocate time and money to address truck safety deficiencies.
A double tractor-trailer carrying handgun ammunition crashed and overturned in a work zone near Benson, AR. The truck driver was the only person injured, and there were no fatalities. An investigation is ongoing to determine what caused the truck driver to crash.
Unfortunately, this crash is just one of many that highlights the dangers of truck crashes in work zones. Although big trucks account for only 4 percent of U.S. registered vehicles, they are dramatically overrepresented in fatal work zone crashes. Large trucks were responsible for 30 percent of all fatal work zone crashes in 2014.
This past year TSC successfully opposed legislative efforts to increase the length of double tractor-trailers by five feet per trailer as the longer trailers would have increased the average stopping distance of the vehicle by 22 feet. As you can see in the pictures, another 22 feet of destruction would have resulted in even more cleanup costs, more traffic, and possibly more injuries and fatalities.
Indiana is using innovative technology to save lives and money by addressing the issue of overweight trucks on Interstates highways. Their pilot program would use a combination of weight sensors in the road that would then trigger a camera to take a picture of the truck’s license plate as a method of catching drivers who violate the weight limit.
As we noted in our successful effort to defeat the Ribble Amendment to the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, which would have increased the federal truck weight limit from 80,000-lbs. to 91,000-lbs., heavier trucks will be more dangerous and more costly to taxpayers. Overweight trucks (greater than 80,000-lbs) disproportionately damage our already deteriorating roads and bridges, and, worse, only pay between 40 and 50 percent of the costs for which they are responsible.
TSC supports Indiana’s drive to enhance their enforcement efforts.
The Washington State Senate is considering a bill, SB 6265, that would increase the weight limit for agriculture trucks traveling on state roads in Washington. Thankfully, there are several state groups that oppose this measure, including the state’s Department of Transportation (DOT) and the State Patrol, citing data that show heavier trucks would decrease safety while increasing the wear and tear on roads and bridges.
According to Washington’s DOT, raising the weight limit from 20,000 to 22,000 pounds per axle would result in a 50 percent increase in wear and tear. In dollars, this translates to an additional $15 million to $25 million per year in road maintenance costs and an additional $32 million a year in maintaining bridges.
The TSC agrees with the Washington DOT and State Patrol, and we have continually stated that heavier trucks will not result in fewer trucks, but more dangerous trucks. We will be mobilizing our Washington volunteers to contact their State Senators to oppose this truck weight increase proposal.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Buried in the fine print of an aviation bill introduced in the House this week is a provision that would prevent states from requiring trucking companies to schedule more generous rest breaks for their drivers than the federal government’s minimum standard.
Laws in 22 states require longer or more frequent rest or meal breaks for workers than the Federal Motor Carrier Administration’s standard for truckers of a minimum half-hour break eight hours after reporting for duty.
The trucking industry challenged the state laws in court and lost. The industry lost again in December when a provision it backed to pre-empt the state laws in favor of the federal standard was taken out of a massive transportation bill at the insistence of Senate negotiators.
The provision has been quietly revived in a bill introduced this week by Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, to overhaul the Federal Aviation Administration.
Safety groups oppose the provision, which they say will be used by companies to pressure drivers to continue behind the wheel when they are tired or hungry.
Rich Pianka, acting general counsel for the American Trucking Associations, said federal law permits truckers to take breaks whenever they feel too tired to drive. The industry objects to the state laws because building in rest breaks on cross-country trips according to state-by-state requirements even if drivers don’t want to use the breaks disrupts planning, he said.
“It’s really not about safety,” Pianka said.
It’s really about money, according to James Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The trucking industry wants drivers to be behind the wheel as much as possible for the time they’re being paid, Hoffa said in a statement. In addition to rest breaks, the provision would also limit how truck drivers are paid, and not compensate them for safety procedures like performing pre-trip inspections, he said.
“It overrules the fundamental principle that all workers should be paid for the time they work,” he said.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released its annual Top 10 Most Wanted List (attached), which represents the agency’s advocacy priorities. TSC agrees with the NTSB on these much-need safety changes, six of which relate to trucking. We have seen progress on some of these issues, but there is still more work to be done.
Reduce Fatigue-Related Crashes
Electronic Logging Device (ELD) Final Rule was released in December 2015, which requires ELDs on trucks.
TSC has been and continues to work towards enhancing Hours-of-Service requirements and reducing truckers’ allowable hours.
TSC supports rulemaking that would require truck drivers to undergo sleep apnea screening.
Promote Availability of Collision Avoidance Technologies in Highway Vehicles
TSC wants mandatory installation of forward collision avoidance and mitigation (F-CAM) technology on all new large trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or more.
NHTSA estimates show that:
Current generation F-CAM systems can prevent more than 2,500 crashes each year.
Future generation F-CAM systems could prevent more than 6,300 crashes annually.
Research indicates that every year a full implementation of F-CAM is delayed:
166 people will unnecessarily die.
8,000 individuals will suffer injuries.
End Substance Impairment in Transportation
TSC is awaiting a final rule for a drug clearinghouse, which would create a federal database to track and store information about CDL holders who have drug and alcohol-related incidents on their records.
The use of any substance, including Schedule II drugs, that impairs cognitive or motor ability should be monitored or eliminated for operators of commercial motor vehicles.
Require Medical Fitness for Duty (See Reduce Fatigue and End Substance Impairment sections)
69% of long-haul truck drivers (LHTDs) are obese compared to 31% in the adult working population.
17% of LHTDs are morbidly obese.
Expand Use of Recorders to Enhance Safety
Event Data Recorders (EDR) are devices that record information related to highway vehicle crash.
EDRs record technical vehicle and occupant information for a brief period of time before, during and after a crash. For example, EDRs may record speed, steering, braking, acceleration, seatbelt use, and, in the event of a crash, force of impact and whether airbags deployed.
TSC supports standardizing and mandating EDRs in all large trucks.
Disconnect from Deadly Distractions
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) publish a final rule in 2010 that prohibits texting by commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers while operating in interstate commerce and imposes sanctions, including civil penalties and disqualification from operating CMVs in interstate commerce.
Recent research commissioned by FMCSA shows that the odds of being involved in a safety-critical event (e.g., crash, near-crash, unintentional lane deviation) is 23.2 times greater for CMV drivers who engage in texting while driving than for those who do not.
By Dailymail.com | Published: 01:55 EST, 29 December 2015 | Updated: 19:03 EST, 29 December 2015
Highlights:
Mary Lambright, 23, made the 1880 historic bridge collapse on Christmas Day in Paoli, Indiana
Iron bridge had a weight limit of six tons – her vehicle and trailer weighed about 60,000 pounds – or 30 tons – at crash
Lambright told police she didn’t know how many pounds were in six tons
No injuries, but the bridge collapsed under the weight and was destroyed
A historic iron bridge was destroyed when a 23-year woman drove her 30-ton trailer across it – because she got her math wrong and did not realize she was five times over the 6-ton weight limit.
Mary Lambright was attempting to haul a 53-foot box trailer containing 43,000 pounds of bottled water to a Walmart parking lot with her Volvo truck on Christmas Day in Paoli, Indiana.
She drove onto the iron 1880 structure and immediately hit the top of the bridge as her truck was too high. The structure then buckled the under the pressure and collapsed at around 12 noon.
Lambright, of Fredericksburg, told police she knew the iron bridge had a weight limit of six tons and wasn’t equipped for semis due to a sign that was posted, but said she didn’t know how many pounds were in six tons.
Lambright and her 17-year-old cousin who was in the passenger seat managed to escape unharmed.
‘She’s a very inexperienced driver,’ Paoli Police Chief Randy Sanders said of Lambright explaining that she had left the Amish order a year or so ago, reports Herald Times Online.
The Amish use nonmotorized modes of transportation so her experience could be limited to horse-and-buggy transportation.
Most Amish are not permitted to drive motor vehicles but are allowed to hire outsiders — known as ‘English’ — to drive them.
Sanders says Lambright, was an independent driver, hauling the bottled water in a leased truck from Penske for Louisville Logistics.
According to police, Lambright was attempting to make a delivery at a Walmart when she missed a turning, reports WBIW.
She said she tried to turn around in a parking lot, but it was not possible because there was equipment in the way.
She told police she did not feel confident in backing up the truck so she then attempted to cross the iron bridge.
Lambright was traveling more than 30 miles per hour in order to get the vehicle stuck that far on the bridge, according to police.
Police cited her for reckless operation of a tractor-trailer, a class B misdemeanor; disregarding a traffic control device, a class B infraction; and overweight on posted bridge.
She could be fined for the infractions and Louisville Logistics could also face legal action.
Lambright received her Commercial Drivers License (CDL) endorsement in May.
The French Lick Fire Department wrote on Facebook: ‘Bridge collapse in Paoli with no injuries reported.
‘What a sad day for the Old Iron Bridge located on South Gospel St.’
Although some Facebook commenters blamed the driver, many others blamed the school that certified her and the company that allowed her to get behind the wheel.
One person wrote: ‘I would look into the trucking school or trucking company that sponsored her training.
‘How do you go thru CDL school and get certified and not know the very basics of weight and/or the weight of even your empty truck and trailer which is still too heavy?’
This NPRM proposes to upgrade Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 223, “Rear impact guards,” and FMVSS No. 224, “Rear impact protection,” which together address rear underride protection in crashes into trailers and semitrailers. NHTSA is proposing to adopt requirements of the Canada Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (CMVSS) for underride guards (CMVSS No. 223, “Rear impact guards,”) that became effective in 2007. The CMVSS No. 223 requirements are intended to provide rear impact guards with sufficient strength and energy absorption capability to protect occupants of compact and subcompact passenger cars impacting the rear of trailers at 56 km/h (35 mph). As the current requirements in FMVSS Nos. 223 and 224 were developed with the intent of providing underride crash protection to occupants of compact and subcompact passenger cars in impacts up to 48 km/h (30 mph) into the rear of trailers, increasing the robustness of the trailer/guard design such that it will be able to withstand crash velocities up to 56 km/h (35 mph) represents a substantial increase in the stringency of FMVSS Nos. 223 and 224.
This NPRM also proposes to adopt Transport Canada’s definition of “rear extremity” to define where on a trailer aerodynamic fairings are to be located to avoid posing a safety hazard in rear underride crashes.
Rear underride crashes are those in which the front end of a vehicle impacts the rear of a generally larger vehicle, and slides under the rear-impacted vehicle. Underride may occur to some extent in collisions in which a small passenger vehicle crashes into the rear end of a large trailer or semi-trailer because the bed and chassis of the impacted vehicle is higher than the hood of the passenger vehicle. In excessive underride crashes, there is “passenger compartment intrusion” (PCI) as the passenger vehicle underrides so far that the rear end of the struck vehicle collides with and enters the passenger compartment of the striking passenger vehicle. PCI can result in severe injuries and fatalities to occupants contacting the rear end of the struck vehicle. An underride guard prevents PCI when it engages the striking end of the smaller vehicle and stops the vehicle from sliding too far under the struck vehicle’s bed and chassis.
The occupant crash protection features built into today’s passenger vehicles are able to provide high levels of occupant protection in 56 km/h (35 mph) frontal crashes. (1) If guards were made stronger to remain in place and prevent PCI in crashes of severities of up to 56 km/h (35 mph), the impacting vehicle’s occupant protection technologies could absorb enough of the crash forces resulting from the impact to significantly reduce the risk of fatality and serious injury to the occupants of the colliding vehicle.
Some of Dustin Weigl’s fondest memories of his older brother, Christopher, include their long-winded arguments about which to spread first, peanut butter or jelly, on a sandwich.
But that banter between brothers ended in 2012, when Christopher, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student, was killed by a truck as he rode his bicycle in Boston.
“My world was absolutely shattered in a way that can never really be repaired,” Weigl said. His voice cracking at times, he testified before the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation Wednesday in support of two bills that would require the installation of protective side guards on certain large vehicles. He said the safety gear could have saved his brother’s life.
“My family believes that this whole collision could have been prevented,” Weigl said. “If side guards had been installed on this truck, Christopher probably would have survived.”
The bills were filed by Representative Daniel Hunt and Senator William Brownsberger, who say bicyclist fatalities often occur when large vehicles take sharp turns and riders fall beneath the vehicles’ rear wheels.
Side guards between the front and back wheels help push cyclists away from the vehicle. The guards can be installed on existing trucks or built into new vehicles.
The lawmakers said side guards and convex mirrors, which would give drivers better visibility, could help reduce bicyclist and pedestrian deaths.
“It’s the appropriate response to a very real issue that the city and the state is facing,” Hunt said.
At least five people died in crashes with trucks in Boston in the past four years, city officials testified at the hearing.
The latest was in August, when Cambridge resident Anita Kurmann was killed while bicycling near the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street. The truck had neither side guards nor convex mirrors, officials said.
“If you look at communities around the Commonwealth, these tragedies are playing out in Cambridge, Brockton, Malden, Northampton, and Wellesley, just to name a few,” said Kris Carter, cochairman of Boston’s New Urban Mechanics office. Carter testified while sitting alongside Weigl.
Boston passed a side-guard ordinance in 2014, following a successful pilot program. Billed as a US first, it requires all large city-contracted vehicles to be fitted with side guards.
But Carter said trucks that are not contracted by the city aren’t required to have the guards, and the city doesn’t have authority to expand the requirement to other trucks.
“That’s where we look to your leadership,” Carter told the panel. “We look to your leadership in recognizing a simple fix that can greatly improve the streets across the Commonwealth for the people of Massachusetts, and set an example for the rest of the country.”
Members of the Boston Cyclists Union and Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition also spoke in favor of the bills.
“We can potentially prevent these incidents from happening,” said Barbara Jacobson, program director at the coalition, “rather than dealing with the after-effects of tragedy.”
The committee also heard testimony about several other bills designed to keep vulnerable road users safe.
One, also filed by Brownsberger, would make it illegal for a motorist to double-park or to idle in lanes designated specifically for cyclists. A violation of the law would lead to a fine of $100.
Another bill would require at least 3 feet of space between cars passing bicyclists or joggers, and even more distance if the car is traveling faster than 30 miles per hour.
Meghan McGrath, an emergency medical doctor who works at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, said her husband was riding in a bike lane last year when he was cut off by a car, causing him to fall off of the bicycle, split his helmet open, and break his hand.
“I feel strongly that we need better rules to protect vulnerable road users,” McGrath said. “Riding a bike or jogging should not mean taking your life in your hands.”
Brianna Arnold, a political science major at Stonehill College whose uncle was killed last week while riding his bicycle in Worcester, agreed.
Tears welling in her eyes, Arnold recalled her uncle’s love for biking.
“The family feels hopeless after such an accident happens,” she said. “Maybe the people . . . listening could hear what happened, and hopefully choose to make those changes that would save someone else’s life.”
Steve Annear can be reached
at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannear.
As this year comes to end, I look forward to the future wherein roads and bridges are safer than they would have been, if not for the dedication and hard work of the Truck Safety Coalition’s (which PATT is a part of) vast network of volunteers.
Equipped with facts and driven by the desire to ensure that others do not have to endure the same grief we did, our organization successfully opposed corporate handouts, like double 33-foot tractor trailers, from being included in the omnibus bill.
The notion that increasing the length of double trailers from 28-feet per trailer to 33-feet per trailer would be safer was premised on the argument that longer trucks will result in fewer trucks. Looking back at the history of truck size and weight increases, however, it becomes clear that the promise of fewer trucks has never come to fruition. Additionally, those longer trucks would have been more difficult to operate due to longer stopping distances and wider turns; and more difficult for motorists to maneuver around due to larger blind spots.
Congress listened to the public and rejected that earmark. It reinforces the fact that advocating to make trucking safer, in the wake of my son, Jeff, and his friends being killed in a large truck crash, is not for naught.
Moving forward, I hope Congressmen will not use the appropriations process as a back door to advance industry-backed agendas. Policies that affect public safety should be subject to open debate, research and analysis.
Mark Rosenker distorted the facts about the safety of double 33s in a Dec. 8 BDN letter to the editor. The former National Transportation Safety Board chairman is now an adviser to the Coalition for Efficient and Reliable Trucking, a group that consists of large corporations that stand to make massive profits if these longer, less safe trucks are allowed on our roads.
Rosenker avoids noting that data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study showed that lengthening double tractor-trailers from 28-feet to 33-feet will result in a six-foot wider turning radius and 22-foot longer stopping distance.
He also ignores the fact that double 33s would replace many of the existing single 53-foot trailers. According to the Truckload Carriers Association, there would be significant diversion within trucking as, in the past, shippers will not support equipment that does not meet the maximum size allowed.
Moreover, pushing for these longer trucks would exacerbate what the trucking industry’s claims is a major problem — insufficient parking for trucks. Adding a minimum of 10 extra feet will actually reduce the amount of useable parking spaces.
In referencing “years of testing” in Alberta, Canada, on double 33s, Rosenker, again, fails to paint a full picture. John Woodrooffe, referenced by Rosenker, attributed much of the good safety performance of longer trucks to the fact that Alberta has among the strictest driver, carrier and vehicle regulations.
Overall, it is disheartening that Rosenker, once the head of a safety agency, has become a peddler of privately-funded pseudoscience.
ARLINGTON, VA (December 16, 2015) – The United States Congress today released an omnibus spending bill that includes the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development (THUD) appropriations legislation, H.R. 2577.
The Truck Safety Coalition worked closely with a coalition of survivors and families of truck crash victims, law enforcement, first responders, truck drivers, trucking companies, and safety advocacy groups to have 33-foot double tractor-trailers removed from the legislation. We hope to continue working with these groups to address missed opportunities to improve truck safety going forward.
We want to especially thank Senators Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) for their leadership, and the hard work of their staffs, in our fight against these longer, less safe trucks.
We successfully advocated for the exclusion of a measure hindering a rulemaking to determine the adequacy of minimum insurance for motor carriers. The minimum financial requirement has not been raised in over 35 years, and is woefully inadequate. Congress should not be using overly burdensome study requirements to stop attempts to evaluate the appropriate level of financial responsibility.
While we are disappointed that the Collins rider affecting hours of service (HOS) was included in the omnibus, we will continue to educate the public and our lawmakers about the dangers of tired truckers. Requiring a truck driver to work up to 82 hours per week will only cause more fatigue related truck crashes, and, in turn, more injuries and deaths. Rather than acquiescing to industry demands, Congress should be making data-driven decisions. We hope that the release of the Electronic Logging Device (ELD) Final Rule will help law enforcement isolate bad actors and help the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) obtain better data on truck driver fatigue.
Moving forward, we hope that Members of Congress will no longer try to use the appropriations process as a back door to advance industry-backed agendas. Policies that affect the safety and wellbeing of the public should be subject to open debate, research, and analysis.
Overall, the Truck Safety Coalition welcomes the improvements made to the THUD component of the omnibus spending bill, and will continue to work to improve the HOS rules.
After Decades of Advocacy Truck Safety Coalition Welcomes FMCSA Release of Final Rule
Requiring Electronic Logging Devices in Large Trucks
Arlington, VA (December 10, 2015): The Truck Safety Coalition today welcomed the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) release of a Final Rule requiring electronic logging devices (ELDs) in all interstate trucks as a long overdue, but much needed advancement in truck safety.
Daphne Izer, founder of Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT) said, “After advocating for nearly a quarter of a century, after our son Jeff was killed by a tired trucker, Steve and I are elated that the FMCSA has issued this rule that will reduce the deaths and injuries resulting from fatigue-related truck crashes and will hold the trucking industry to a higher standard of safety. We are confident that the realization of one of PATT’s primary goals will ensure that our roads will be safer from the dangers of fatigued truck drivers.”
Izer continued, “This technology will reduce the ability of bad actors to skirt federal regulations by modernizing the practice of logging hours. Also, the rule will protect truck drivers from harassment and coercion to exceed the hours they are allowed to operate. ELDs automatically record driving time, thereby removing the ability of truck drivers to circumvent compliance by simply writing down false hours. It is absurd that certain segments of the industry fought so hard to hold on to this archaic business practice from 1938. While this Final Rule is a testament to more than 20 years of successful advocacy to reduce truck driver fatigue, it is bittersweet. While we find solace in knowing that this ELD Final Rule will save an estimated 26 lives and prevent 562 injuries resulting from large truck crashes, we wish that we did not have to wait so long to prevail.”
Dawn King, President of the Truck Safety Coalition, which is a partnership between Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH) and PATT, also lauded the FMCSA for issuing the ELD Final Rule: “The inclusion of ELDs in large trucks is beneficial for everyone who travels on our nation’s road and bridges. Motorist and truckers will be safer as this technology will limit the ability of truck drivers to exceed Hours of Service (HOS) regulations, in turn, reducing the likelihood that big rig drivers will become fatigued while driving. Had this technology been in place back in 2004, I would have been able to celebrate at least one more Christmas with my Dad, who was killed by a fatigued driver just days before the holiday.”
“Additionally, this will enhance law enforcement officers’ capacity to enforce HOS restrictions and expedite the process of reviewing a truck driver’s logbook,” King said. “The shift from paperwork to electronic logging will not only save time, but money too – the FMCSA estimates that this rule will result in a benefit or more than $1 billion. While we are pleased with the many benefits that will come along with the implementation of this rule, I would be remiss not to mention our disappointment with the exemption to this rule for trucks built before model year 2000. There should be no exemptions to this life-saving, cost-reducing technology.”
John Lannen, Executive Director of the Truck Safety Coalition added, “We are pleased the ELD Final Rule has been issued, and we look forward to the full implementation by the year 2017. Though this was a major win in fighting truck driver fatigue, in order to fully address this fatal problem more must be done, like improving working conditions, screening for sleep apnea, requiring fewer hours behind the wheel, addressing parking needs, and restructuring compensation.”
BY DAPHNE IZER, JANE MATHIS, DAWN KING AND TAMI FRIEDRICH TRAKH
Every day families from Michigan, Florida, Maine and California, as well as millions of other Americans drive on our nation’s roads to go to work, vacation, run errands, and come home. Sadly, each year large truck crashes kill nearly 4,000 people and injure another 100,000 people before they reach their destination. Each of us of became involved with the Truck Safety Coalition in order to make trucking safer so that another daughter, mother, or sister did not have to endure the sudden and overwhelming grief that accompanies losing a loved one in a large truck crash.
Congress has a real opportunity to reverse the worsening truck crash death and injury trends and to protect public safety. Our elected officials can start by taking out provisions from the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development (THUD) Appropriations bill that mandate Double 33 foot tractor-trailers throughout our country and allow truck drivers to work upwards of 80 hours per week. These proposals are industry earmarks that do nothing to advance safety, and, if enacted, will actually degrade safety.
Increasing the length of double tractor trailers from 28 feet per trailer to 33 feet per trailer will result in longer vehicles that are up to 91 feet in length. Statistics show that Double 33s have a six-foot wider turning radius, a 33 percent increase in low-speed off-tracking, and a 22-foot longer stopping distance than existing double tractor trailers. In short, these longer trucks are harder to operate and will make merging and passing more difficult for truck drivers and other motorists. If anything, Congress should conduct a more in-depth study on the safety of Double 33s before mandating them on our roads and bridges. The American public wants our Senators and Representatives to make data-driven decisions, not hazardous experiments that endanger us in order to pander to moneyed interests.
Increasing the hours of service for truck drivers is another prime example of a policy proposal that puts the interests of businesses before the safety of individuals. Truck driver fatigue is a major safety concern and contributing factor to fatal truck crashes. Congress should be doing more to address this problem. Unfortunately, Senator Collins has included language that reduces a truck driver’s weekend and increases their work week from 70 hours to 82 hours. Permitting truck drivers to work for up to 82 hours per week, by removing the two night requirement and one restart per week limit, will push tired truck drivers to continue operating and putting lives at risk.
Congress should stop and consider the consequences of passing legislation that is riddled with corporate handouts. Failure to change the direction our country is heading with regards to truck safety will result in more than 20,000 people being killed and nearly 500,000 people being injured in truck crashes in the next five years. These numbers are staggering, but we know from our own experiences that it just takes the death of one pe
The notion that Congress should be “praised” for a bipartisan effort to pass a multiyear highway spending bill is questionable. Doing so is Congress’ job, and, frankly, this bill is the bare minimum. As a mother who lost her son in a truck crash, I would not praise this legislation, which largely ignores safety.
A little more than a year ago, my son, Michael, was killed in a truck crash due to the truck driver’s negligence. If the truck he crashed into had not made an illegal U-turn and was equipped with sideguards, he would likely be alive today. Unfortunately, even after my son’s preventable death, Congress has failed to advance common-sense safety features that would save lives and prevent injuries.
Rather than requiring rear and side underside guards or forward collision avoidance and mitigation (F-CAM) braking systems on all large trucks, which would benefit everyone on our roads, Congress is pushing through several earmarks that only benefit the trucking industry. Mandating high-risk interstate teen truckers, exempting classes of truck drivers, and limiting the liability of shippers and brokers in their hiring decisions do not enhance safety — they roll it back.
Congress cannot continue to ignore the fact that truck crash fatalities have risen 17 percent nationwide and 37 percent in Tennessee between 2009 and 2013. Passing a bill that would move our country forward on safety would actually be deserving of praise.
On Oct. 24, 2010, in Henderson County, a speeding tractor-trailer crashed into a line of cars stopped on Interstate 26 due to an earlier crash. My son, Chuck Novak, was killed.
The total number of fatalities and injuries in the crash that killed Chuck was 15. The motor carrier that caused the crash only held a $1 million policy, slightly higher than the minimum now required, which was split among five families who lost loved ones and 10 injured, as well as all other parties who had a claim to the settlement, such as emergency responders and the state of North Carolina.
The insurance did not come close to covering medical costs of those injured or providing for surviving families and children, like my grandson.
It is time for Congress to increase the minimum levels of insurance required by trucks so that they can actually cover the costs of crashes like the one that killed my son.
Please ask your representative and senator to raise the minimum level of insurance to cover catastrophic crashes, because no family should have to endure the grief of suddenly losing a loved one as well as financial devastation resulting from the same crash.
Jackie Novak
Hendersonville
Link to Article: http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20151203/OPINION/151209957?tc=ar
The $305 billion highway bill announced by lawmakers on Tuesday limits an effort to lower the minimum age of truck drivers on interstate trips from 21 years of age to 18 to veterans and current military members and reservists.
The 1,300 page measure, which was unveiled days before a Friday deadline for renewing federal transportation funding, eschews a broader proposal to lower the minimum age of all interstate truck drivers in a pilot program that was approved earlier by the House and Senate.
Safety groups praised lawmakers for placing limits on the number of teenage truck drivers that will be allowed on U.S. roads.
“By restricting the three-year teen trucker pilot program to veterans and servicemen above the age of 18, Congress greatly restricted the amount of higher-risk drivers that would be allowed to drive trucks across state lines,” Truck Safety Coalition Executive Director John Lannen said in a statement.
The proposal to lower the minimum age of truck drivers was included in earlier appropriations bills that were approved by the House and Senate, igniting a fight between truck companies and safety groups that revved up as lawmakers were pressing to beat the rapidly approaching Dec. 4 highway funding deadline.
Supporters argued the idea of lower the minimum age for truckers was a modest effort to address a driver shortage that trucking companies have complained has hampered cargo movement in the U.S.
“This amendment would strike a limited pilot program that is authorizing drivers over 19 1/2 to enter into a graduated program to obtain a commercial driver’s license,” Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) said when the proposal was being debated on the House floor in October.
“What’s interesting about the way present law is [written] is that a driver that’s over the age that’s being discussed here can drive all the way across the state of Missouri, for instance, but they can’t drive 10 miles in the city of Kansas City because it’s across state lines,” Graves continued then. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and it actually hampers a whole lot of business.”
Truck companies cited a shortage of truck drivers they said has reached 48,000 as they pushed for the minimum age of interstate drivers to be lowered, arguing that older truckers are retiring at a faster clip than younger replacements are coming on line.
“The ability to find enough qualified drivers is one of our industry’s biggest challenges,” American Trucking Association President and former Kansas Gov. Bill Graves (R) said in a statement about the driver shortage released in the middle of the highway bill debate.
Democrats argued that it is too risky to turn the wheels of big rigs over to teenage drivers, however.
“Ask any parent, they know young drivers do not always listen, even when an experience is in the front seat,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said during the House highway bill debate.
Lawmakers ultimately split the difference, limiting the lower truck driver age limit to veterans and active military members.
The Truck Safety Coalition’s Lannen praised lawmakers for reaching an agreement that “removed several dangerous policies, improved upon other anti-safety measures,” though he added that the compromise bill “unfortunately, included some troubling provisions.
“We are extremely thankful to the members of Congress on the Conference Committee that listened to the facts and to the people,” he said. “Their hard work is evidenced by the positive changes made to the final bill.”
Link to Article: http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/261765-305-highway-bill-limits-teen-truckers-to-veterans-military-members
ARLINGTON, VA (December 1, 2015) –The Senate and House Conferees today released a conference report for the surface transportation reauthorization bill, H.R. 22. The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, as it is now known, removed several dangerous policies, improved upon other anti-safety measures, but unfortunately, included some troubling provisions. We are extremely thankful to the Members of Congress on the Conference Committee that listened to the facts and to the people; their hard work is evidenced by the positive changes made to the final bill.
Sections limiting shipper and broker liability in hiring decisions, allowing greater exemptions to hours of service requirements for classes of truck drivers, and prohibiting states from providing further break protections for drivers were ultimately removed from the final bill. These provisions only benefitted private interests at the expense of public safety. We are glad that reason prevailed, and that the Conferees advanced the interests of their constituents rather than the interests of corporations.
Language regarding the minimum level of insurance required by large trucks, crash weighting, and teen truckers was also improved. Conferees removed some of the overly burdensome hurdles that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) would have to go through in reviewing the required level of minimum insurance for large trucks. They also decided that any crash weighting determination should be reviewed first by the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee (MCSAC), before requiring the FMCSA to engage in a costly ineffective review process. Additionally, by restricting the three-year teen trucker pilot program to veterans and servicemen above the age of 18, Congress greatly restricted the amount of higher-risk drivers that would be allowed to drive trucks across state lines.
Regrettably, measures allowing state and industry specific exemptions are still embedded in the bill. Weight exemptions for logging, milk products, and natural gas vehicles will endanger our roads and will set dangerous precedents for future weight exemptions. It is time for Congress to close the backdoor to nationwide weight increase and stop enacting these corporate earmarks.
Other troublesome provisions that remain include hiding Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) scores from public view and implementing a “beyond compliance” point system into CSA scores. Concealing scores that are collected by taxpayer-funded law enforcement officers on tax-payer-funded roads essentially robs the motoring public of two things: the ability to access data that they paid for and public safety.
Overall, the enhancements to the final bill shows that the Truck Safety Coalition’s concerns were heard, and we are thankful to the Members of Congress and their staffs that listened.
Thanksgiving Travels Should Remind DRIVE Act (H.R. 22) Conferees to Promote Safety
November 24, 2015
Dear Conferee:
Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel weekends of the year with millions of people driving to visit friends and family. For many of us, however, we are one or several guests short. The absence of a friend or a family member serves as a grave reminder of the sudden, unnecessary loss that we experienced upon losing a loved one in a large truck crash. Busy travel weekends like this remind us of the dire need to reform our current system and advance safety on our nation’s roads and bridges. The best way to ensure the safety of the motoring public in the long term is for Congress to remove the anti-safety provisions in the multi-year surface transportation reauthorization bill.
A provision permitting interstate teen truck drivers is a misguided measure that will allow higher-risk drivers to get behind the wheel of an 80,000-lbs. truck. Yet, Congress is moving forward on this despite the public’s firm opposition to lowering interstate truck driving age from 21 to 18. A recently release public opinion poll showed that 77 percent of the public is opposed to this proposal. Congress should listen to the public, look at the safety statistics on teen drivers, and act accordingly.
Furthermore, the bill is stuffed like a turkey with other industry handouts such as providing exemptions to the federal weight limit and hours of service (HOS) requirements for certain industries. If passed, families will be forced to maneuver around heavier trucks and drive next to truckers who could be working for more than 80 hours per week. Legislation to increase truck weight limits, or loosen HOS requirements, industry-by-industry is merely a back door attempt by trucking interests to come back to Congress in a few years and push for increases across the board.
It is upsetting that some Members of Congress are so willing to accept dangerous policy proposals without studying them first, like mandating Double 33 tractor trailers and allowing teen interstate truckers. It is even more upsetting, however, that these same lawmakers erect roadblocks to impede studies on pro-safety policies, like increasing the minimum levels of insurance or requiring forward collision avoidance and mitigation (F-CAM) braking systems on all large trucks. Congress should be utilizing the rulemaking process to ensure they have the best information to make a data-driven decision on an issue, not to block measures that do not align with special interest requests.
This holiday season, as families eagerly await for the arrival of their loved ones, we urge you to remedy the safety setbacks in the DRIVE Act before another family has an empty chair at their Thanksgiving table this year. As survivors and families who lost loved ones in large truck crashes, we would be thankful for a safe holiday weekend and for a transportation bill that actually advances safety for the next six years.
JOINT STATEMENT ON RELEASE OF NEW STUDY, “UNCLOGGING AMERICA’S ARTERIES 2015”
DAWN KING, PRESIDENT OF TRUCK SAFETY COALTION,
BOARD MEMBER OF CITIZIENS FOR RELIABLE AND SAFE HIGHWAYS (CRASH)
JANE MATHIS, VICE PRESIDENT OF TRUCK SAFETY COALTION
BOARD MEMBER OF PARENTS AGAINST TIRED TRUCKERS (PATT)
Yesterday, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, and the American Highway Users Alliance, held a press conference on the results of a new study that identifies and ranks America’s worst 50 traffic bottlenecks, “Unclogging America’s Arteries 2015, Prescriptions for Healthier Highways.” While we welcome more information about the effects of congestion on our roads, we were stunned that safety was largely omitted from the discussion. This should not be the case considering there was a 17 percent increase in truck crash fatalities and a 28 percent increase in truck crash injuries between 2009 and 2013. Congress cannot simply acquiesce to the trucking industry’s demands; failing to identify opportunities to improve safety as part of the congestion discussion is a mistake.
Thanksgiving, for many, is a joyous time when families gather around the table to talk and reflect. In families like ours, however, the empty seat at our table serves as a constant reminder of our loved ones that were needlessly killed in truck crashes. This year during the Thanksgiving weekend, approximately 55 people will be killed and another 1,300 people will be injured in large truck crashes. We must do more to stop these truck crash deaths and injuries from occurring; we must do more to ensure that other families don’t have an empty chair this year at their tables.
Unfortunately, select shipping and trucking interests are currently advancing efforts in Congress that will benefit only them, while making our roads less safe for everyone. Our senators and representatives should not vote for the cornucopia of dangerous special interest handouts stuffed into the DRIVE Act. Trucking interests may be thankful for provisions allowing interstate teen truck drivers, permitting greater Hours of Service exemptions to certain classes of motor carriers, or slowing rulemakings to review the minimum level of insurance, but the motoring public and taxpayers will continue to pay with their wallets and lives.
The American Trucking Associations (ATA) President and CEO Bill Graves’ aggressive agenda to include language in the DRIVE Act and Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development (THUD) Appropriations bill to increase truck size and weight speak to the ATA’s true intentions – increasing profits at any expense. There is no safety rationale for Congress to increase the length of double tractor trailers from 28 feet per trailer to 33 feet per trailer, which would result in a 22 foot longer stopping distance and a larger blind spot.
This misguided policy cannot be the solution to the troubling fact that trucks constitute four percent of the registered vehicles in this country, but are involved in 28 percent of all fatal work zone crashes. If anything, a longer stopping distance will make tragic crashes where the truck driver is unable to brake in time before colliding into the backs of cars stopped in traffic more common. We have seen these types of truck crashes all too often: an April crash in Georgia that claimed the lives of five nursing students, a June crash in Tennessee that left six dead, and just two days ago in Pennsylvania, two more lives were ended by a truck that crashed into them because the truck driver could not stop his vehicle in time.
Instead of considering longer trucks, Congress should have been working to include a mandate for forward collision avoidance mitigation (F-CAM) braking systems on all large trucks. This technology warns drivers and, ultimately, will apply the brakes if the truck is getting too close to another object or vehicle. It is disappointing that Congress did not include an F-CAM requirement in the DRIVE Act that would actually prevent crashes, reduce injuries, and save lives.
In yesterday’s statement, former governor Graves said, “these bottlenecks cost our economy billions with the delays they cause moving our nation’s freight. They are truckers’ worst nightmares come true, but one that tens of thousands of our nation’s freight haulers have to deal with daily.”
Taking someone’s life should be a trucker’s worst nightmare, not being delayed.
Please join us in spreading a message of safety this holiday season. This Thanksgiving should not be about the trucking industry being thankful for a holiday weekend in which as few dollars as possible were lost due to traffic and delays. It should be about the public being thankful for a safe holiday weekend in which as few people as possible were needlessly killed or injured in truck crashes.
To Conduct Safety Study of Double 33-Foot Trailers by Voice Vote
ARLINGTON, VA (November 19, 2015) – Yesterday, sound judgement prevailed and the U.S. Senate passed, by voice vote, an amendment proposed by Senators Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to require a safety study on Double 33 tractor trailers before they are federally permitted.
This is a huge victory for survivors and victims of large truck crashes, law enforcement, truck drivers, trucking companies, truckload carriers, and the American motoring public. We appreciate that the Senate voted responsibly by seeking to fully understand the safety impact of these longer trucks before considering whether they should be allowed on our roads.
This was a great win, but there is still a long road ahead. The amendment has to make it out of the Conference Committee, which will consolidate the House and Senate versions of the THUD Appropriations bills. The final bill must then be passed again by both chambers and signed into law by the President. We hope that the Senate’s second vote in two weeks to oppose a federal mandate requiring Double 33s sends a clear and consistent message to the House that safety must remain a top priority in crafting transportation policy.
A recent poll showed that 77% of Americans reject the ideas of these larger Double 33 tractor trailers being driven on our roads. We are pleased that the Senate listened to three out of four Americans, instead of the handful of industry lobbyists who are pushing this dangerous agenda with no regard for its effect on public safety.
The Truck Safety Coalition is grateful for all the Members of Congress that listened to the stories of those who lost family members to truck crushes, and those who survived them. A special thank you goes out to Senators Wicker and Feinstein for their leadership on truck safety issues and for working tirelessly to underscore the dangers of allowing these longer trucks.
We write to express our concerns over troubling provisions that were considered or included by the House of Representatives during its action on the surface transportation bill.
This long-term legislation could set federal transportation policy for the next six years. The final transportation bill should advance safety, not roll back important safety and consumer protection policies.
Rather than advancing important safety issues, proposals from the House could erode safety, short-change consumer privacy, undermine environmental and energy security measures, and erect roadblocks to holding industry accountable. Making the necessary investments in our nation’s infrastructure – a goal we strongly support -should not come at the expense of weaker safety and consumer protections. For those reasons, we urge you to prevent any rollback of safety or consumer protections relative to the Senate-passed transportation bill in order to avoid any potential erosion of support for the final bill.
Problematic provisions considered during House action on the bill include:
Lower funding levels for critical safety and infrastructure programs;
Provisions that insulate companies from liability or limit discoverability and withhold information from victims of accidents across transportation modes, including hiding information that could help the public make more informed choices about safety – for example , through new FOIA exemptions;
Provisions that provide et immunity from prosecution by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for committing unfair or deceptive acts as long as an auto company maintains a “privacy policy,” no matter how inadequate or undecipherable;
Provisions that provide fuel economy or greenhouse gas emissions credits for the inclusion of V2V, crash avoidance and other safety technologies, eroding the oil savings and greenhouse gas emissions reductions these credits are intended to incentivize;
Provisions that give automakers that submit and comply with their own secret cybersecurity “best practices” exemptions from civil penalties and FTC enforcement actions, but prevent an automaker’s failure to submit such a plan from being used as evidence against them in a legal action;
Provisions that waive environmental and safety requirements for small-volume automobile manufacturers;
Provisions that prevent the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) from bringing enforcement actions and prevent courts from considering non-compliance with voluntary guidelines issued by the Department of Transportation as evidence of liability, but allow industry to use its own compliance with those guidelines as exonerating evidence in the same court or NHTSA enforcement proceeding;
Provisions that stifle or stop important safety regulations, including minimum insurance for truck drivers;
Provisions that make exemptions or are giveaways to the trucking and auto industry, including requirements that could limit the publication of life-saving warnings, without completing proper study or including requirements to mitigate the safety impacts; and
Provisions that hamper truck safety, including requiring younger truck drivers on our
Some of these provisions were wisely not included in the bill passed by the House.
Nonetheless, we remain concerned that these issues could inappropriately reemerge for consideration as both bodies continue to move forward toward a final agreement. We note that the inclusion in a conference report of any provision not contained in either the House or Senate text is a violation of Senate Rule XXVIII, and we ask that you follow the spirit of that rule in any final agreement. Furthermore, we urge you to press against House-passed provisions that would worsen safety relative to the Senate bill.
We know you share our concerns for the safety of our constituents, and we ask for your support to ensure that the issues listed above are not included in any final agreement as Congress works on a long-term surface transportation bill. We look forward to continuing to work
together to pass a responsible bill with sufficient funding that provides states, municipalities and stakeholders with certainty so they can tackle long-term projects and rebuild our infrastructure. Together, we must resist efforts to use this important legislation as a vehicle for controversial provisions that undermine public health and safety.
As representatives of the nation’s leading consumer, public health, and safety organizations, and families who have had loved ones killed in preventable motor vehicle and motor carrier crashes, we are writing to express our continuing concerns and strong objections to the House and Senate highway reauthorization bills’ failure to advance needed public safety laws and programs. As you begin conference negotiations to harmonize the language in the two bills, we urge you to remove anti-safety provisions and include commonsense and cost-effective safety improvements. Without your efforts to ensure critical changes to address the rising carnage on our roads and highways, the next surface transportation reauthorization bill could turn out to be the most anti-safety transportation legislation ever enacted into law.
For 25 years, the surface transportation reauthorization bill has been a laudable, bi-partisan effort to advance sound, sensible and cost-saving proposals resulting in safer cars and trucks, safer drivers and safer roads. As a result, laws were enacted that: ensured airbags became standard equipment in the front seat of all passenger vehicles and a freeze on the spread of double and triple-trailer trucks in every state was achieved (1991); created a national zero tolerance blood alcohol content (BAC) law for underage drinking and driving (1995); required advanced airbags and initiated incentive grants for occupant protection and stronger drunk driving laws (1998); developed requirements for vehicle safety standards resulting in electronic stability control technology on every vehicle, improved roof strength, ejection mitigation, and mandatory truck safety improvements (2005); and, advanced motorcoach safety improvements for basic occupant safety protections such as seatbelts, roof crush prevention and occupant ejection protections (2012). In stark contrast, 2015 marks the year that the highway reauthorization bill does little to address the well-known issues and workable solutions to deadly safety problems, and also throws safety in reverse by omitting critically needed safety measures and including repeals of existing safety rules.
We urge you to remedy the following safety issues during Conference:
Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety: Teen Truck and Bus Drivers, Public Safety Scores, and Anti-Safety Exemptions: Provisions to allow teen drivers to get behind the wheel of an 80,000 pound rig or bus and operate in interstate commerce must be removed. This misguided idea was resoundingly rejected by DOT ten years ago because of overwhelming opposition and compelling research showing the unacceptable high crash risk of young drivers. Previous studies have shown intrastate CMV drivers under the age of 19 are four times more likely to be involved in fatal crashes, and CMV drivers between the ages of 19-20 are six times more likely to be involved in fatal crashes. A sensible outcome would be to strike the pilot program for teen bus and truck drivers and substitute it with a study of the safety of intrastate truck drivers before launching this program.
Additionally, provisions to hide from public view the safety scores of unsafe motor carriers including passenger bus companies benefit only carriers with poor safety scores. Keeping consumers in the dark about the safety of their families as they drive on roadways or as their children are transported on school field trips is unacceptable and must be stricken from the bill.
Moreover, we oppose all of the many exemptions to truck size and weight limits and truck driver hours of service requirements, as well as the burdensome regulatory roadblocks which impede safety advances.
Inadequate Penalties: There have been ten Congressional hearings on vehicle safety defect issues during the 113th and 114th Congresses, yet Congress has not taken any meaningful or corrective actions to stop auto industry cover-up and to hold corporations accountable. Manufacturers who knowingly conceal vehicle safety defects or sell a dangerously defective vehicle should be subject to criminal penalties, as is the case under many other federal consumer enforcement laws. Higher fines and criminal sanctions are needed to prevent manufacturers from viewing penalties as just another cost of doing business.
Increase National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Funding Levels: NHTSA is drastically underfunded, receiving only one percent of the overall DOT budget even though 95 percent of transportation-related fatalities and 99 percent of transportation injuries occur on our streets and highways. There are few, if any, products on the U.S. market that have a greater impact on the public health of Americans than the automobile. In addition, their economic impact is extraordinary, with new and used cars representing over $1 trillion in sales and $14 billion in advertising. Yet with so many lives, injuries and consumer dollars at stake, Congress is choosing to underfund the one agency that has the potential to reduce the tragic toll vehicles take on America’s public health. Pending language slashes authorization levels for carrying out the mission of NHTSA by a total of $90 million over 6 years. There is an urgent need to correct NHTSA’s chronic underfunding, and not to further hobble the agency’s safety and oversight mission.
Eliminate Loopholes to Rental Car Recalls and Include Used Cars: It is necessary to fix loopholes in the bill language that limit consumer protection from defective vehicles only to companies that rent cars as their primary business. Customers of car dealerships that provide loaner or rental cars need the same safety recall protection, but dealerships would be exempted under this provision. Likewise, purchasers of used cars should not be imperiled by a safety recall the car dealer knows about but refuses to repair.
Remove Bureaucracy and Roadblocks to Safety Rulemaking: Mandating numerous wasteful studies and industry-stacked Councils, Regulatory Negotiation committees and additional bureaucratic hurdles and procedures impose roadblocks to needed safety rules by NHTSA and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). The unnecessary impediments must be eliminated.
Advance Child Safety: The final bill should include provisions requiring NHTSA to issue safety rules to prevent serious injury or death to children and other passengers in rear seats of vehicles. There is an urgent need to improve front seat back strength because seat backs have been shown to fail even in low speed crashes killing and maiming children in the rear seat who are restrained. The current federal vehicle safety standard has not been changed since it was first adopted in 1967. Furthermore, it is time that NHTSA moves forward on a rule requiring a reminder system for children inadvertently left behind in a vehicle. Children are needlessly dying while the adoption of available life-saving technology is delayed.
Considering the record recalls involving over 100 million vehicles over the last two years for vehicle defects which led to at least 200 preventable deaths, corporate cover-ups, and an unacceptable mortality and morbidity toll each year of 33,000 deaths and over 2 million injuries, this bill is a unique opportunity to advance bi-partisan safety solutions. Unless significant changes are made to the bill, it will seriously imperil public safety for the next six years and beyond. We urge you to take action that will save lives and spare families, and not succumb to special interest roll backs that jeopardize safety on our nation’s highways.
Senate Votes in Favor of Wicker Motion to Instruct Conferees
To Study Safety Effects of Double 33 Foot Trailers by Margin of 56-31
ARLINGTON, VA (November 10, 2015) – Today, reason prevailed and the U.S. Senate voted in favor of Senator Roger Wicker’s (R-MS) Motion to Instruct Conferees to require a safety study of Double 33s before mandating these longer trucks on our roads. This nearly 2-1 vote was a major win for survivors and victims of large truck crashes, law enforcement, truck drivers, trucking companies, truckload carriers, public health and safety groups, and the American public. We are pleased that the Senate employed a data-driven approach that allows for further study on the safety effects of Double 33s as well as an opportunity for public input.
In voting for this measure, Senators listened to the Department of Transportation recommendation that there should be no increase to truck size or weight because of insufficient data to support such a change. This was the right move, especially given the steadily worsening trends of truck crash fatalities and injuries. Congress should understand the impact of the length increase on pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists, as well as the additional wear on our nation’s roads and bridges before mandating them. It is only logical to study this truck configuration further, which we already know takes 22-feet longer to stop and have a six-foot wider turning radius than Double 28s.
As the House and Senate head to conference to resolve the differences between their competing versions of the multi-year surface transportation reauthorization bill, the DRIVE Act (H.R. 22), there is still work to be done to improve the safety title of the final legislation. We ask negotiators to remove provisions that allow teenagers to drive trucks across state lines as well as those that hinder rulemaking to increase the minimum insurance required by large trucks. Rejecting measures to increase truck size and weight are a step in the right direction; however, allowing the aforementioned safety rollbacks to remain in the final bill would be a step backwards for safety.
The Truck Safety Coalition is especially thankful for all of the congressional support for truck crash survivors, the families of truck crash victims, and for our mission to promote safety. We want to specifically thank Senators Wicker and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) for their outstanding leadership on this issue.
More Anti-Safety Provisions Must Be Removed as Bill Heads to Conference
Washington, D.C. (November 5, 2015) – Today the House of Representatives passed its multi-year surface transportation reauthorization legislation, H.R. 22. While this bill still contains anti-safety provisions, a nation-wide truck weight increase is not one of them. A large and diverse coalition of truck crash survivors and families of truck crash victims, law enforcement, safety advocates, labor, truckers, and trucking companies joined together to urge Congress to reject heavier trucks. They listened. By a bipartisan vote of 236 against and 187 in favor of the measure, the amendment failed – a resounding rejection of the misinformation and specious arguments that heavier trucks will result in fewer and safer trucks.
It is unfortunate, however, that the House’s version of the Highway Bill still contains dangerous safety rollbacks and omits any safety advances, some of which were offered as amendments. We urge conferees to remove these anti-safety amendments that were approved in the House as well as dangerous provisions in the base bill:
Opposed Amendments Agreed to by House by Voice Vote:
Farenthold #76: Grandfathers heavy trucks on future I-69 – agreed to by voicevote.
Ribble #23: Increases air-mile radius from 50 to 75 under Hours of Service – agreed to by voice vote.
Duffy #9, Crawford #60, Lipinski #106, Nolan #3: Various weight exemptions – offered as en bloc amendment.
Crawford #93: Allows towing of two empty trailers together – offered as en bloc amendment.
Neugebauer #67: No hazmat endorsement for farm trucks transporting fuel – offered as en bloc amendment.
All of these exemptions weaken safety and undermine law enforcement efforts.
Opposed Provisions in House Highway Bill:
Sec. 5404: Allowing Teen Truckers
There is no data that analyzes whether it is safe to allow teenagers to operate commercial motor vehicles in interstate traffic. In fact, research has demonstrated that truck drivers younger than age 21 have higher crash rates than drivers who are 21 years of age and older.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) previously declined to lower the minimum age for an unrestricted CDL to 18 as part of a pilot program because the agency could not conclude that the “safety performance of these younger drivers is sufficiently close to that of older drivers of CMVs[.]” The public overwhelmingly opposed the idea with 96 percent of individuals who responded opposing the proposal along with 88 percent of the truck drivers and 86 percent of the motor carriers who responded.
Secs. 5221, 5223, 5224: Changing Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) Data
Hiding critical safety information in the FMCSA’s CSA program will deprive consumers from learning about the comparative safety of motor carriers and bus companies when hiring a motor carrier company to transport goods or people.
Letting the public know the government safety scores promotes public accountability and improves safety. CSA is working as intended and includes a process so that it can continue to be fine-tuned and improved.
Sec. 5501: Delaying Rulemaking on Minimum Financial Responsibility
Minimum insurance levels have not been increased in more than 35 years.
During this time the cost of medical care has increased significantly and the current minimum requirement of $750,000 is inadequate to cover the cost of one fatality or serious injury, let alone crashes in which there are multiple victims.
Sec. 5224: Limiting Shipper and Broker Liability
Shields brokers and shippers from responsibility based on low standards related to hiring decisions. Reducing standards effectively removes safety from the carrier selection process.
We are thankful for the efforts and hard work of our network of volunteer truck safety advocates, who consist of truck crash survivors and families of truck crash victims. Their tireless dedication to improving truck safety is admirable, and their voices were definitely heard on Capitol Hill this past month as we had our largest Sorrow to Strength Conference to date. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Representatives Lois Frankel (FL), John Lewis (GA), and Hank Johnson (GA). Had your commonsense amendments passed the House, motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians, and truck drivers would be much safer.
Trucking has become increasingly less safe, as seen by the 17% increase in truck crash fatalities and 28% increase in truck crash injuries between 2009 and 2013. Congress must do more to reverse these trends, not exacerbate them. We ask the conferees to remove the provisions that will endanger public safety, and, instead, promote policies that will make safety a number one priority.
House of Representatives Votes to Reject Truck Weight Increase on our Nation’s Highways by a Margin of 236 to 187
During Consideration of 6-Year Surface Transportation Bill (H.R. 22)
ARLINGTON, VA (November 4, 2015) – Last night, the House of Representatives voted and rejected an anti-safety amendment sponsored by Representatives Reid Ribble (WI), Kurt Schrader (CO), David Rouzer (NC), and Collin Peterson (MN). The amendment sought to increase the federal truck weight limit from 80,000-lbs. to 91,000-lbs. This vote was a victory for safety and for all those who travel on our highways. The American people have been clear and consistent in their opposition to heavier trucks and Members of the House listened.
In voting against this measure, Representatives dismissed recycled myths and instead made decisions driven by data. The Department of Transportation (DOT) conducted a study on Truck Size and Weight, required by Congress in MAP-21, and concluded that there should be no increase to truck size and/or weight. We are pleased that Members who voted in opposition to the Ribble Amendment appealed to logic and listened to the initial findings of the DOT study.
The Truck Safety Coalition is especially thankful for all of the Congressional support for our victims and for our mission to promote safety. During our biennial Sorrow to Strength conference, which took place two weeks prior to this vote, truck crash survivors and families of truck crash victims came to Washington, D.C. to let their representatives know that there is a dire need to stem the increasing rates of truck crash deaths and injuries. Members were moved by the accounts of loss and tragedy.
We were proud to have joined a diverse coalition of safety advocates, law enforcement, labor, truck drivers, and trucking companies in this efforts. We are particularly thankful for the leadership of Representatives Jim McGovern (MA), Michael Capuano (MA), Lou Barletta (PA), Grace Napolitano (CA), and Jerrold Nadler (NY) in keeping safety at the forefront of the debate on the transportation bill.