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Truck Speed * USA - ... Too Fast, Too Slow?
NY,USA -Forbes, by Robert Malone -6 Mar 2007: -- Big truck speed is up for grabs... There are truckers and there are truckers. Fleet truckers and independent truckers are upstairs and downstairs. The former are big owners with big staffs, in contrast to the proudly independent truckers. The former are served by the American Trucking Association (ATA) and the latter by the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA)... If a motorist is asked, trucks are always going too fast down hills or too slow up hills. Trucks can go very fast, but there is both a cost and a gain depending upon the context. If a truck goes fast it delivers faster and spends less time on the road. If a truck goes too fast it uses more fuel and may cause more accidents... Each year about 5,000 die on U.S. highways as a result of truck crashes. Excess speed is often given as the cause but the issue is, to a degree, clouded. In the large truck causation study by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), traveling too fast was found to be the critical precrash event in 18% of all crashes where trucks were analyzed as the core cause of the accident... In the American Transportation Research Institute's (ATRI) high-risk study, it was shown that of those drivers convicted of 15 mph speeding offenses, 56% were found to be involved in a truck crash the following year... Speed of a truck picking up or delivering can be perceived as a value in a world of just-in-time. However, whatever value is attached would have to be measured against the loss of life. The issue is not merely independent truckers as against fleet managed truckers, as speed can be a value for either and yet neither side wants to advocate a life threatening standard... The issue is also a green issue and a cost issue, as slower speed saves fuel. All the parameters of the truck speed issue need closer examination and a great deal more attention to the correlation between speed and fuel use, and speed and logistics savings... Further the issue needs closer monitoring of exactly how many fatalities are produced by every mile in excess of 68 mph, or other standard speed. Certainly there are many contributing factors and some of them can be more or less the cause of the accident: environmental conditions such as ice, sleet, rain or fog... These are targeted by the FMCSA and ATRI but it is not clear from the information presented as to the correlation between factors...
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