Truck Crashes Spark Criticism of Safety Agency

More than 5,000 people are losing their lives in truck crashes on America’s highways every year--a growing proportion of them in passenger vehicles--and the little-known federal agency charged with enforcing truck safety is under fire from government investigators and consumer groups for doing too little to stop the carnage.

The Office of Motor Carriers, an obscure corner of the Federal Highway Administration in the Department of Transportation, has dallied for more than a decade without revising 60-year-old regulations to prevent trucker fatigue, which is a leading cause of accidents.

Records show the agency is doing fewer preventive safety inspections of trucking companies and collecting less in fines than during the early 1990s.

And critics say the office discourages its inspectors from using high-tech satellite data to improve enforcement.

The agency “is not doing its job,” said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who chairs a panel that oversees transportation funding. Wolf wants to move the agency--with its $150 million annual budget and 700 employees--from the road-building FHA to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Saddled with a dual mission of both regulating and promoting the trucking industry, the Office of Motor Carriers has few friends left in high places.

“I wouldn’t call it an agency,” said Joan Claybrook, head of the consumer group Public Citizen. “It’s so inept, it’s an extension of the American Trucking Assns.”

Even the federal government has joined the critics. Todd Zinser, assistant inspector general for investigations at the Transportation Department, was equally upset.

“If we had 5,000 fatalities a year in aviation, there would be radical action,” Zinser said. “If you had an airline cited for repeated violations and nothing changed, that airline would be grounded. None of that happens with motor carriers.”

‘We Have Saved Lives’

Gloria Jeff, deputy administrator of the FHA, said that the truck office is doing the best it can to police a rapidly changing industry.

“We have saved lives, not increased the loss of lives,” she said.

Trucking is vital to the American economy. Trucks ferry more goods than either railroads or airlines. But pressed to meet tighter delivery schedules because customers are keeping smaller inventories, truckers are also the bane of drivers everywhere. Spewing gravel on windshields and careening across crowded freeway lanes, trucks are the staple of local news video of chain-reaction death on the highway. Although car drivers bear a significant share of the blame in accidents, trucks are becoming, to the public, an unacceptable risk.

“The public sees truck safety as more akin to aviation safety,” said Chuck Hurley, spokesman for the National Safety Council, one of the nation’s oldest safety groups. “They want more than normal action.”

House and Senate committees are planning hearings on truck safety this spring, and the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal watchdog agency, has made the issue a priority for 1999.

Things could get worse before they get better.

A decision is pending under the North American Free Trade Agreement to give Mexican trucks, which inspectors have found more prone to safety violations, open access to U.S. roads.

In California, 409 people were killed in truck accidents in 1997, the latest year for which statistics are available. Reflecting the mismatch in weight between trucks and other vehicles, only 1 in 6 victims was a trucker.

In 1977, people in cars, vans and pickups accounted for 65% of those killed in truck crashes nationally. Twenty years later, however, passenger vehicle deaths had risen to 75% of the total, and deaths among truckers fell from 22% to 14%. The remainder of those killed were pedestrians and others.

Steve Saar, a dentist from Carlsbad, believes that his sister, Linda, four of her children and an infant grandson would still be alive if trucking safety rules had been strictly enforced.

Linda Saar, a 43-year-old New Mexico schoolteacher, drove with her family to California last summer for a Disneyland vacation.

Late at night on the way back home, the family’s Ford Taurus station wagon was stopped in traffic on Interstate 10 near Phoenix when a tractor-trailer plowed into them from behind at 72 mph, just under the posted speed limit of 75 mph, police said. All six members of the Saar family were killed, as was the truck driver.

According to police, all signs pointed to trucker fatigue as the cause. Investigators found that the trucker had exceeded limits on driving hours. At the crash scene, there were no skid marks or signs that the trucker attempted to brake or swerve, indicating he may have dozed off.

Despite federal rules limiting drivers to 10 hours at a stretch behind the wheel, it is widely acknowledged that many violate the limits to make delivery deadlines.

“This accident could have been avoided,” said Steve Saar, whose family is suing the trucking firm. “We want to make some changes so that out of our tragedy something good can happen.”

On-Board Recorders Being Considered

One safeguard would be to use on-board recorders on trucks, as is widely done in Europe. As part of its effort to improve truck safety, the transportation safety board is organizing a conference later this year on the subject.

Recorders would make it virtually impossible for truckers to lie about hours. For example, the Transportation Department’s inspector general is investigating a trucker who drove 2,700 miles from Los Angeles to Washington in 48 hours and claims to have followed the rules on rest. To do that, he would have had to maintain an average speed of 90 mph. A recorder could have shown when the truck was moving, how fast it was going and when and how long it was stopped.

In the meantime, the truck office relies on inspectors poring over paper logbooks.

The agency gives the states money to pay the salaries of state inspectors who conduct 2 million roadside truck checks a year. Another 225 federal inspectors concentrate on trucking companies, conducting safety inspections and assessing fines for violations of federal rules. With an estimated 400,000 trucking companies, the office inspects fewer than 2% of the firms a year.

“If you break the law, we will hunt you down and put you out of business,” claims Jeff of the FHA.

But critics say the agency has been slow to act. For example:

* In 1995, the office and the trucking industry set a goal of reducing the proportion of trucks in fatal crashes. That year, trucks accounted for 8% of vehicles in fatal crashes. The agency’s aim was to reach 7% by 2003. Instead, it rose to 9% in 1997.

Jeff attributed the increase to “year-to-year fluctuations.” She cited other statistics that show a sharp decline in the per-mile fatal accident rate for trucks since the 1980s. However that decline leveled off more than five years ago.

* In 1997, the office adopted a policy of focusing its inspections on companies with poor safety records. That year, the number of inspections dropped by 32%, and the fines collected plummeted to $2.7 million from $6.9 million. Congressional officials had expected an increase from pursuing so-called bad actors.

The agency says this new approach is more complex, and that it started to produce results in 1998, when fines rose to $3.8 million. But one inspector wrote Wolf to say the workload is down from 5 cases a month three years ago to one a month now. Inspections “save lives,” the official wrote. “Why aren’t we doing enough of these?”

* The agency spent more than $4 million on a study of driver fatigue that was partly overseen by a trucking industry research institute. Because of the industry connection, safety groups dismiss the study’s credibility.

Current rules require drivers to take an eight-hour break after 10 hours behind the wheel. The industry wants the government to allow more hours of driving, but the NTSB is arguing for stricter rules that specifically require time for sleep.

* Many trucking companies are switching to high-tech satellite systems to keep exact track of their fleets. Satellite records are virtually tamper-proof and can be used to verify driver hours. Yet the office, under industry pressure, has instituted a policy that discourages its inspectors from asking to see these records. To do so, inspectors must seek the approval of a high-ranking agency manager. Not surprisingly, inspectors have stopped asking, according to agency sources.

There are some positive developments in the industry. Drunken driving is rare among truckers. The intoxication rate for truckers in fatal crashes declined by 57% since 1987, the largest decrease for any group.

Walter McCormick, president of the American Trucking Assns., said the industry’s record is one of “extraordinary improvements to safety.”

Yet safety groups see the close relationship between the truck office and the industry as a barrier to improvements.

In late November, the office was forced by its parent agency to withdraw from a long-planned safety summit. Consumer groups had publicly complained that the event was “stacked” in favor of the trucking industry.

The cancellation was particularly galling to McCormick, who accused consumer groups of falsely characterizing the event.

“One can only ask if this is an effort to intimidate public officials,” McCormick said.

That argument draws skepticism on Capitol Hill.

“There is too much of a cozy relationship” between the office and the trucking industry, Wolf said.

Like Wolf, NTSB Chairman Jim Hall questions whether the office belongs in a highway agency whose main function is paying for roads.

“In Washington, when you have any organization that has two responsibilities and one is to give out money and the other is safety, people tend to do what is more popular and give out money.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Cars vs. Trucks

The nation’s highways have become safer for just about everybody except people in passenger vehicles that collide with trucks.

More than 2,100 car drivers and passengers died in 1997 in accidents involving trucks*, about the same number as in 1975.

1997: 2,112

* Tractor trailers and other large trucks in excess of 10,000 pounds.

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Meanwhile, the number of truckers killed in crashes with cars plunged by more than half...

1997: 34

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... and the number of people killed in crashes between two cars declined by more than two-fifths.

1997: 4,107

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration