Fatigue and Trucks a Deadly Mix

Federal highway safety standards that date to the Depression era currently allow long-range truckers to spend too much time behind the wheel without adequate rest. The result too often is a major accident, a truck against a car, with predictable injuries and deaths. New rules attached to this year’s federal transportation bill would rightly limit those hours and bring the trucking business into the Computer Age. Electronic recorders would replace the archaic and easily falsified paper logs that many haulers manipulate so they can drive even longer hours than the current lenient standards allow.

Unfortunately, the Senate version of the transportation bill would prevent the spending of any money toward the development of these new rules. The House version carries no such attachments, and it deserves support.

There are compelling reasons behind the Clinton administration’s push for better monitoring and longer mandatory rest breaks for drivers. Statistics from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration show that 56,556 Americans died between 1988 and 1998 in accidents involving large trucks and more than 1.45 million were injured. Drowsy truckers account for about 750 deaths and 20,000 injuries each year, say federal officials.

The federal Transportation Department has proposed a daily driving limit of 12 hours for truckers. Currently, California rules permit 15-hour work shifts for drivers, but just 12 of them behind the wheel. Federal rules permit 16 hours of driving per day.

The Transportation Department had a strong case for reducing the driving limit for long-distance drivers, who account for the lion’s share of fatigue-related crashes. But federal officials erred in applying those limits to bus lines, grocery delivery and other short-haul driving in which driver exhaustion is not considered a problem. That gave opponents the wedge they needed to try to scuttle the rules outright. The proposed new limits on long-range drivers should be salvaged, and there should be no restrictions on spending that would go toward further refinement of the rules.

Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the transportation bill conference committee, says that the rate of truck-related fatalities in the United States is “15 people dying each day, or the rough equivalent of a major airline crash every two weeks.” Limiting hours behind the wheel on long-haul trips is one way to put a dent in those numbers.