Truck Fatalities Fall 12%

This story appears in the July 13 print edition of Transport Topics.

Truck-related highway fatalities plummeted 12% in 2008 to 4,229, the lowest total since the federal government began keeping records, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said.

The drop was the third decline in three years and pushed the number of truck-related deaths to its lowest point since NHTSA began tracking the statistic in 1975. The number of people killed in large-truck accidents was 593 below 2007’s total, NHTSA said July 2.

While government and industry officials hailed the lower fatality total, some observers said the decline was partly related to a drop in truck miles driven.

Steve Campbell, executive director of the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Alliance, called the improvements in trucking’s safety record “very impressive,” but added, “the obvious question is, ‘How much did mileage go down?’ ”

“We think this 12% reduction is something to be very encouraged about,” Rose McMurray, acting head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, told Transport Topics. She added, “clearly everyone would agree that with the downturn in the economy, the fact that truckers were logging fewer miles last year contributed to the reduction.”

“This achievement is great for all highway users,” American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves said in a statement. “We must build upon this and look toward long-term improvements. The trucking industry remains committed to safety and ATA will continue to advance its aggressive safety agenda in an effort to further this outstanding trend.”

Overall highways fatalities fell 9.7% to 37,261, NHTSA said. “While the number of highway deaths in America has decreased, we still have a long way to go,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.

In 1999, when Congress created FMCSA, truck deaths accounted for 12.9% of all highway fatalities. Last year, they accounted for 11.3%, the lowest percentage since the agency was formed and down from 11.7% in 2007. This was the fourth straight annual decline in the proportion of large-truck fatalities to all highway deaths.

Last year also was the second straight year that fatalities totaled less than 5,000; a benchmark commonly used by enforcement and agency groups to assess truck safety.

Deaths of truck drivers and passengers also fell dramatically in 2008, dropping 16% to 677, the lowest point since 1994.

The Federal Highway Administration has yet to publish its estimates for truck miles traveled in 2008, but the agency estimated that miles traveled by all vehicles in 2008 fell 2.7% to 2.92 trillion.

Estimates of truck miles traveled are generally not available until later in the year.

Even with the decline in overall vehicle miles traveled, the fatality rate for all vehicles fell to 1.27 per 100 million miles traveled, a 7% drop from 2007, NHTSA said.

Fred McLuckie, legislative director of the Teamsters union, told TT that because “freight traffic is way down . . . that’s probably one of the reasons for the drop in crashes and fatalities.”

Freight reports such ATA’s tonnage index showed severe declines during 2008 as the economy slowed. Tonnage fell an estimated 3.5% to 10.2 billion tons in 2008 from 10.6 billion tons the previous year.

Even factoring in the economy’s effect on the fatality figures, McMurray said that ongoing efforts to reduce truck fatalities appear to be working.

“We’d also like to think that there’s been more of a sustained effort by the industry, law enforcement, governments both state and federal, and safety groups focusing more attention on this problem,” she said. McMurray pointed to outreach programs that encourage seat belt use among truck drivers to enforcement activities that allow police to issue citations to passenger vehicles operating unsafely around large trucks.

“All of those things are contributing toward the bottom line,” she said.

CVSA’s Campbell agreed, saying that efforts focused on “people that are causing crashes, whether they are in an automobile or a truck” have him “cautiously optimistic” that the industry can sustain its safety gains.

McMurray said the steep decline in driver fatalities probably was the result of both a drop in overall crashes and an increase in seat-belt use, though without more intensive research, she couldn’t say for sure.

“I think it could be the reduction in the number of crashes obviously and, when crashes do occur, the 72% belt-use rate across the board — it has to result in drivers not being ejected and not being killed as a result of a serious crash,” she said.

McMurray declined to specifically credit the revised hours-of-service rule for safety improvements, despite the fact that since the rule went into effect in 2004, truck-related deaths have fallen 19%.

“We certainly don’t have evidence that it’s not working,” McMurray said, but added that the agency need to more closely examine the figures before crediting the regulation with reducing crashes.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is currently preparing to hear a third challenge to the HOS rule by advocacy and interest groups.