Accidents waiting to happen

Next time you drive down a freeway jammed with big rigs, you’d better hope the truckers navigating those 80,000-pound vehicles next to you aren’t falling asleep at the wheel, say highway safety advocates and others in the trucking industry. If they are nodding off, it may be the federal government you have to blame, they say.

Despite its mandate to improve truck safety on the nations’ roadways, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has enacted rules that do just the opposite, argue some safety experts, truck drivers and others in the trucking industry.

Instead of making the situation safer, the federal rules have led to an increase in driver fatigue and accidents, says Jacqueline S. Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, based in Washington, D.C.

Despite mounting concerns over long hours of service and trucker fatigue, the federal agency decided in October to continue to dramatically increase the number of hours commercial truckers could drive before taking a break and the hours they could drive per week.

Though originally adopted in 2003 to address problems including driver fatigue and accidents, the federal rules have instead made the situation even more hazardous for truck drivers and other vehicles on the road, says Greg Owen, past president of the California Trucking Assn. in Sacramento. He now owns a trucking firm in Carson.

Infuriated over the agency’s ruling, safety and consumer groups have joined union and trucker groups in filing a lawsuit in federal court challenging the new guidelines. The rules have led to an increase in driver accidents, they say in the Feb. 27 suit.

“We think these rules are really unsafe,” says Stephanie Williams, senior vice president of the California Trucking Assn. “They push drivers to not take naps when they are tired or eat when they are hungry. It’s not right.”

The federal agency defends the new rules, saying they reflect science-based standards that are enforceable. “We will work with the Department of Justice to vigorously defend this position to the court,” says spokesman Duane K. DeBruyne.

Before 2003, the duration of service rules capped driving at 60 hours in a seven-day rotation. The new rules permit drivers to accumulate as many as 77 hours of driving.

Before the change, a driver could divide rest time during long hauls, Williams says. But now the rule is that drivers must stop for eight consecutive hours. If they pull over because they need to rest, they’re penalized on their hours, she says.

“We are litigating this because we are seeing an increase in accidents,” she says.

Large-truck accidents involving driver fatigue have long been a serious problem nationwide. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) blames driver fatigue for 31% of all truck driver fatalities.

Texas and California led the country in the number of fatal vehicle crashes in 2004. Of 5,695 fatal vehicle crashes in California, 381 (6.7%) involved large trucks. Texas had an even higher rate of large-truck accidents. Of the 4,887 fatal accidents in that state, 423 (8.7%) of them involved large trucks, according to NHTSA’s National Center for Statistics and Analysis.

Seventy-seven percent of those killed nationwide in these accidents were riding in another vehicle, and 15% were occupants of a large truck. An additional 8% were pedestrians, according to the National Center for Statistics and Analysis.

For people who have lost friends and family in accidents involving large trucks, the federal government’s decision to increase allowable driving hours is disturbing. Tammy Friedrich of Corona, who lost her sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew in a truck accident in 1998, is angry over the government’s decision. “I lost so many in my family when the double tanker truck jack-knifed and exploded into flames.”

“Where is the [public] outrage?” asks Gerald Donaldson, senior researcher for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. If this involved airline accidents and deaths, he says, people would be demanding more safety measures.

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Jeanne Wright can be reached at jeanrite@aol.com.