Interest Groups Fault FMCSA on Truck Safety

Click here to write a Letter to the Editor.
A coalition of trucking safety groups issued a report this week giving poor grades to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for failing to do enough to reduce large truck-related fatalities.But the agency said that truck crash rates have declined in the past decade, even though overall traffic level rates have increased.“This has happened in large part because of the millions dollars that the FMCSA has invested in inspectors, facilities and safety programs to improve the performance of commercial vehicles on the roads,” FMCSA spokesman Ian Grossman told Transport Topics.American Trucking Associations also took issue with the report.“It appears more important to groups like that to make headlines than to have substantive input into shaping safety policy,” said Dave Osiecki, ATA’s vice president of safety, security and operations.The report was released by the Truck Safety Coalition, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and Public Citizen.It ranked the 50 states in terms of truck crash deaths per 100,000 population, listing Wyoming as the deadliest state for trucking, with 6.09 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2005. The national average was 1.76, and 22 states had rates higher than that, the group said.“For years, [FMCSA] has routinely failed to meet deadlines to implement mandated safety rules and regulations that would have surely prevented deadly big truck crashes,” said Daphne Izer, founder or Parents Against Tired Truckers, one of the coalition members.