* Florida - Commercial Truck Drivers are Safest on the Road
Dunnellon,FLO,USA -Ask The Trucker, by Allen Smith -January 25, 2012: -- Safety advocate groups continue to argue that commercial motor vehicle drivers contribute a major danger to road safety. Organizations and political leaders tend to bow to their suggestions in relationship to their own agendas... SafeRoads.org is one of the largest voices condemning professional truck drivers and motor carriers concerning highway safety, often mentioning that fatigue is a “contributing factor in as many as 30-40% of all heavy truck crashes.” The problem with this statement is that it is completely false... Today, the truth is that commercial trucks are involved in 2.4% of all car accidents and more than 80% of those accidents are the fault of the non-commercial driver. Furthermore, only 16% of all truck driving accidents are due to the truck driver’s fault and of those death related accidents, only 4% of trucks are fatigue related... According to the FMCSA, truck driver fatigue was a factor in just 1.4% of all fatal truck accidents... A motorist who drives 100,000 miles a year has 20 times the accident exposure risk than a driver who logs 10,000 miles in a year. The more miles spent behind the wheel, obviously will raise the accident/fatality factor... Who would you consider to be the safest driver? The auto driver with one accident in two years after 24,000 miles or the truck driver with two accidents in two years after 200,000 miles? ... Now that we see that five major motor carriers and their professional truck drivers have an over-all accident average of 0.1126 per 100,000 miles driven and an over-all fatality average of .0012 per 100,000 miles driven . . . Let us compare these rates with the non-commercial driver:
- As of May 19th, 2010 – the fatality rate for auto drivers in the state of Arizona, was 2.1 per 100,000 miles driven.
As further examples, for 2007, the last date for available data, the fatality rate for auto drivers, per 100,000 miles driven were:
- Massachusetts – 0.76
- Rhode Island – 0.80
- Pennsylvania – 1.37
- Louisiana – 2.17
- Montana – 2.45
Crashes involving big trucks make for big news and although one life lost is a tragedy, safety groups and non-commercial drivers need to look at the true, hard facts when it comes to who are really the safest drivers on the road...
Labels: road safety debate
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