Safety Culture Lacking on Highways

The trucking and academic worlds came together to brainstorm over a question that has a lot of people scratching their heads: Why do accidents happen?

Discussions centered on how human factors influence the number of crashes involving heavy trucks and what can be done to meet the goal established by Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater of reducing fatalities by 50% over the next 10 years.

This perplexing problem has recently focused a lot of attention on truck drivers, who often get blamed by the public for accidents that were not their fault.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration found that of 1,936 head-on collisions in 1998 between a truck and a passenger vehicle, 1,724 involved the passenger car encroaching into the travel lane of the truck.

The Department of Transportation has proposed a plan to reduce the hours a trucker can spend behind the wheel in the hope of reducing truck-related accidents. The debate over hours-of-service reforms has some asking if there is a better way to lower the number of truck-involved crashes.

So with this in mind, the 21st Century Driver and Truck Alliance posed the weighty question to a group of panelists during a Aug. 1 roundtable forum sponsored by the Transport Topics Publishing Group in Alexandria, Va. The alliance is a nonprofit group formed by former National Football League player Tony Benjamin, president of C.T. Express in Seattle.

For the full story, see the Aug. 14 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.