Trucking Safety Debate Intensifies

The debate over trucking’s safety record ratcheted up another notch Friday as Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways released the group’s annual rankings of the worst states for big truck fatalities.

American Trucking Associations President Walter B. McCormick, Jr., called the news conference orchestrated hysteria and said that truck safety is steadily improving.

At the press conference held at the Washington, D.C. offices of Public Citizen, CRASH leaders also criticized the Office of Motor Carriers and urged the transfer of the agency from the Federal Highway Administration to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

"The truck safety record for this country continues to deteriorate," CRASH Chairman Joan Claybrook said. "Government inaction and industry obstruction are making things worse."

Ms. Claybrook also called for including truck drivers under the Fair Labor Standards Act to give them an eight hour work day, with less time behind the wheel and more time off between shifts.

"This industry and this government have created a regulatory culture of weak rules and laws and paralyzed compliance, and all motorists suffer for it, including truck drivers," said CRASH Executive Director Michael Scippa.

According to CRASH statistics, Texas led the country in 1997 for truck-related highway deaths, with 454 fatalities. Texas Motor Transportation Association President Bill Webb said the statistics do not take into consideration the size of the state and the number of miles traveled within the state.

"Texas has more than 138,000 miles of roads and commercial vehicles travel more than 17 billion miles per year," Mr. Webb said. "When you take that into consideration, Texas has one truck-related fatality for every 34 million miles traveled in the state."

"The trucking industry has an enviable safety record. Miles driven are up, the fatality rate is down," Mr. McCormick said. "The fatal accident rate for the past year was at its lowest in a decade. Government statistics show that in that period the rate of fatal accidents involving large trucks has dropped 31%, even though mileage has increased 43%."

Mr. McCormick urged the Department of Transportation to increase its efforts to improve truck safety by rescheduling the National Truck and Bus Safety Summit cancelled by the Federal Highway Administration last month, issuing a pro-posed rule updating federal hours of service laws and "responding aggressively to the hysteria being created about truck safety by groups using misleading statistics."

While FHWA declined to respond to CRASH’s criticism of OMC, a FHWA official did dispute Ms. Claybrook’s statement that truck safety is deteriorating. "There’s a decade-long trend indicating that fatalities in large truck crashes have decreased 6 percent between 1988 and 1997," said the spokesman, who declined to be identified by name.

The spokesman said that OMC conducts two million road-side safety inspections annually of trucks, buses and drivers, initiates 2,000 enforcement cases annually against motor carriers that violate federal motor carrier safety regulations and conducts more than 6,000 annual compliance reviews of trucking companies.

"FHWA is committed to highway safety, especially truck safety," the spokesman said. "With our new nationwide strategic enforcement strategy, we will continue working toward improving truck safety."

Mr. McCormick’s full statement can be seen at www.truckline.com. CRASH’s press release can be read at www.trucksafety.org.