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STUDIES * USA - Determinants of U.S. Truck Safety and Applicability to Mexican Carriers
To better target its safety enforcement activities toward those carriers that pose a greater safety risk, the FMCSA has studied the safety performance of different categories of trucking
Washington,DC,USA -Congress & Law -November 15, 2009: ... These studies indicate that safety performance does vary depending on the type of cargo hauled, which can be useful for evaluating safety statistics of Mexican trucks cited below. As hypothesized earlier, one study found that refrigerated trucks do have a better vehicle safety record compared to several other segments of the trucking industry... This study also found that U.S. drayage carriers have a relatively poor vehicle safety record, but this finding may not be applicable to Mexican drayage carriers because of an important difference in the trailer equipment used. U.S. drayage carriers predominantly haul international shipping containers at seaports or at inland rail terminals which use a separate piece of equipment—a chassis that is an I-beam frame with wheels, to pull the container over the road. The chassis are owned and maintained by the ocean carriers but their proper maintenance has been a widely recognized problem and is likely a contributing factor to the poor vehicle safety performance of U.S. drayage carriers... At the Mexican border, truck trailers (the wheels and “container” are inseparable) are predominantly the equipment being pulled... Studies also indicate that drivers of refrigerated cargo are found with safety violations more often than drivers in several other categories of trucking... This may be because refrigerated cargo is time sensitive and hauled longer distances so drivers may be more prone to falsify hours-of-service log books. One study found that while there was little difference between refrigerated and non-refrigerated trucking in terms of number of accidents and moving violations, drivers of refrigerated trucks had more logbook violations... This study found that drivers that graduated from college or had some college were 27% more likely than high school graduates to violate their logbook. The study authors reasoned that as education level increased, drivers became more sophisticated in manipulating the logbook or felt more confident that they could do so without being caught... While U.S. drayage carriers receive low scores for vehicle safety, their drivers generally receive higher safety scores than other segments of the trucking industry... Hours-of-service violations and falsifying log books are the most common violations found among U.S. truck drivers but since drayage carriers predominantly make short-haul trips, it seems logical that this violation would be less common among these drivers. Since Mexican truckers in the United States are predominantly making short-haul trips one could expect that they too would have relatively good driver safety scores, which the data do indicate... A congressionally mandated study of the causation of accidents in the United States involving large trucks that resulted in at least one fatality or injury found that the driver is a more critical factor than the vehicle... The study reports that in those incidents in which the truck was determined to be primarily responsible for the crash (as opposed to a passenger vehicle), in only about 10% of the cases was the critical factor related to a problem with the truck; in 87% of the incidents the driver was considered the critical factor in the crash... (Video from YouTube, by maggie1138 - 11 Nov 2006: Big truck accident in los angeles freeway)
Labels: safety studies
posted by Unknown @ 4:33 AM
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