UMTRI Seeks New Money Sources After FMCSA Cutback

This story appears in the Jan. 28 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON — University of Michigan officials said they are beating the bushes looking for money to salvage key, long-term research into commercial vehicle crashes since the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration cut them off in late September.

Officials with the school’s Transportation Research Institute said they are seeking $600,000 from various government agencies and the trucking industry to revive a program that has provided detailed analysis of fatal crashes.

Speaking to members of the Trucking Industry Research Committee of the Transportation Research Board here in mid-January, program head John Woodrooffe said information from two databases — Trucks Involved in Fatal Accidents (TIFA) and Buses Involved in Fatal Accidents — played a key role in the development of vehicle stability-control systems and collision-avoidance technologies.

The federal government has used data from UMTRI’s analysis to formulate hours-of-service regulations and to evaluate truck and trailer underride systems, he added.

Funding for the program — and a smaller project evaluating state crash data — was cut at the end of September by FMCSA.

Agency spokesman Duane DeBruyne said a determination was made in 2012 that FMCSA’s position as the sole source of funding for the UMTRI programs was “financially unsustainable.”

“At this point in time, difficult budgeting choices have to be made across the agency,” DeBruyne said. “Moving forward, FMCSA will continue exploring innovative, economical ap-proaches in collecting and analyzing large truck and bus crash data.”

Woodrooffe said UMTRI has not yet received any formal commitments to fund the program and that four full-time researchers and more than a dozen part-time interviewers have been laid off.

“A lot of institutional knowledge has been lost,” said Daniel Blower, an associate research scientist at UMTRI.

Blower said the loss of funding diminishes UMTRI’s ongoing research capabilities. Besides commercial vehicle policy, the institute is involved in research in injury prevention, sustainable transportation and driver behavior.

The overall program employs a staff of 141 and has an annual research budget of $13.7 million, according to the UMTRI website.

“Anything done [by UMTRI] on safety uses TIFA data,” Blower said. “It was a very valuable resource. There’s no shortage of truck safety data, but a major resource has gone away.”

Sean McNally, vice president of communications for American Trucking Associations, said UMTRI’s work “has been incredibly beneficial to both government and industry.”

“ATA is willing to help UMTRI re-initiate its TIFA analysis work,” McNally said in a statement to Transport Topics. “We are also optimistic that interested government agencies and industry partners will step forward to assist financially.”

Consultant Bob Scopatz of Data Nexis Inc. decried the loss of information at a time when Congress is asking federal regulators to make decisions that are “data-driven.”

“We have worked decades to get to where we are now, and the loss of key data systems seems like a step backward,” Scopatz told TT.

“What I would hope is that there are even better data sources being developed as we move forward. The truth is that there are important gaps in our knowledge that can only be filled by improved data sources,” he said.

What is needed, Scopatz said, “is high-quality data that decision-makers will use.”

Work on TIFA began in 1980 and was initially supported by the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association, an organization that represented truck and car makers.

Under the program, data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System were combined with information gathered by UMTRI researchers to identify the type of vehicles involved in crashes, the type of cargo being hauled, the number of hours of driving leading up to the crash and other operational details.

FMCSA is planning to conduct a number of its own safety studies, including an updated version of its Large Truck Crash Causation Study, which was first compiled in 2006.