Editorial: A Safety Shout-Out

Usually, when you work for a federal regulatory agency and you’ve got good news to report, the rule is to shout it out as loudly as possible and as many times as possible from as many places as possible.

But recently, when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration received its final data, confirming that 2009’s safety record for crashes involving large trucks was the best in history, the agency chose to quietly post the results on its website — with no public announcement or press release.

That data — the latest available due to the cumbersome nature of the collection of such information — is well worth shouting about, and we’re going to do so right here, since the agency didn’t.

Some highlights, as shown in the final data:

• The number of fatal crashes involving large trucks on our highways fell 31% from 2007 to 2009.

• The number of people killed in those truck-involved crashes fell to 1.17 per 100 million miles driven in 2009, the lowest level since the federal government began compiling the statistics in 1975.

• The fatal crash rate of trucks per 100 million miles declined from 2007 to 2009 by 26%. The fatal crash rate for trucks has now fallen 54.5% since 2000, more than twice the gains recorded for passenger vehicles over that same time.

As ATA President Bill Graves said after the new data was located on FMCSA’s website, “These safety gains are the result of many things: sensible regulation; improvements in technology; slower, more fuel-efficient driving; the dedication of professional drivers and safety directors, as well as more effective enforcement techniques that look at all the factors involved in crashes, not just a select few.”

Surely, FMCSA should have done more with this data when it was received.

“These results,” Graves said last week, “deserve to be heralded as tremendous progress and very good news for American motorists, our industry and our industry’s regulators.

“However, FMCSA has chosen not to highlight these important results. By not celebrating this success, the agency is doing itself a disservice. These results are as much an achievement for FMCSA as they are for the nation’s trucking industry.

“We are at a loss on why FMCSA chose not to communicate this final data indicating great safety progress.”