Editorial: Safety Equals Flexibility

Two hundred thirty-six. That is how many truck occupants died in highway crashes during 2012 who were not wearing a safety belt, according to the federal government.

The real number is even higher, when factoring in the 182 occupant deaths where no determination on safety-belt use could be made.

Data on truck-occupant fatalities were a major focus of a presentation at the Transportation Research Board meeting last week by Jack Van Steenburg, chief safety officer of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

He also discussed how many truck-involved fatalities are related to speeding and distracted driving.

The 2012 figures, the latest available, were all the more striking as they followed FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro’s comments opening the session.

Ferro referenced research efforts on driver health, compensation and detention times as part of a list of rulemakings and research on FMCSA’s growing agenda this year.

Those topics are on top of an FMCSA to-do list that includes a pending electronic onboard recorder mandate, modifications to the Compliance, Safety, Accountability ratings program and studies of last year’s changes to the hours-of-service rule.

Though a federal court decision ended the legal dispute over driver hours, since then, trucking has taken its case to have HOS rules amended straight to FMCSA.

We reported in the Dec. 23 & 30 edition about the agency’s plan to conduct a field study on the effect of split rest times for truckers who use sleeper berths. That followed the announcement by American Trucking Associations and the Minnesota Trucking Association they had proposed a pilot program that looks at the relationship between safety and flexibility in using sleeper-berth breaks.

Ferro said at TRB: “We can test the concept by introducing some degree of flexibility within the context of strong oversight” through a pilot program and technology such as electronic logs.

She added that FMCSA wants to “continue to improve the environment in which drivers operate and the companies that employ them operate.”

This brings us back to the fatalities data from Van Steenburg and FMCSA’s stated goal of “zero commercial vehicle deaths.”

Though it can be debated whether zero is an attainable goal, the data provide strong supporters of HOS flexibility an opportunity. If more would-have-been fatalities become crash survivors simply because they used safety belts, truck-involved fatalities would fall rapidly. And the more officials are able to talk about fatalities going down, maybe it would yield more favorable results from  FMCSA’s rulemakings and studies for the industry.