![[Valid Atom 1.0]](valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
RULES and REGULATIONS vs. TRUCKS ACCIDENTS * USA
The link between Tracy Morgan’s tragic accident and trucker pay
Washington,D.C.,USA -Think Progress, by Alan Pyke -September 11, 2014: -- One of the first major safety innovations in trucking was born out of a collision between tragedy and celebrity... The steel bars that hang horizontally below the tail end of tractor-trailers aren’t just stepladders for shipping employees. They’re meant to keep your head attached to your neck in the event that you rear-end an 18-wheeler. Called Mansfield Bars, they’re named after postwar pin-up model and movie star Jayne Mansfield, who died gruesomely after her car rear-ended a tractor-trailer in 1967...
On June 7 of this year, at 1:00 in the morning, a Walmart truck driven by a man named Kevin Roper failed to brake and slammed into a vehicle on the New Jersey Turnpike. In that vehicle was actor and comedian Tracy Morgan. Morgan and other passengers in his car were severely injured, and a friend of his killed... Roper’s truck was going 20 miles over the speed limit when it killed the friend, James McNair, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary investigation. Roper had allegedly been awake for 24 hours when he failed to respond to speed limit signs and traffic in front of him. He had 28 minutes left to get to his destination in nearby Perth Amboy or he would hit his daily cutoff time of 14 hours on duty and have to stop... Once again, the combination of a household name and a preventable highway death is calling attention to the often obscure and always persnickety process by which federal regulations get ginned up, drafted, re-written, lobbied against, and ultimately put into practice... All sides of the debate over trucking regulations want the industry to be safe... Last summer, the regulations withstood lawsuits not only from the ATA but from a pair of safety groups that argued the rules were too lax to protect the public... To the Teamster lobbyist’s eye, that multi-faceted distaste for the rule is a good sign... While they disagree about whether or not to keep tinkering with the rules around driver behavior and driver pay, suggested that the future of highway safety lies in technological innovation. Radar systems that alert drivers to traffic ahead of them or in their blind spots, automated logbooks that would replace pen-and-paper driver timesheets, and enhancements to cruise control, braking systems, and vehicle-to-vehicle passive communication are just a few of the technologies that each man mentioned when asked where the safety fight is headed in the next five years... The gizmos have gotten more sophisticated since Jayne Mansfield’s day, but the basic dynamic is the same: so long as 80,000-pound machines are going to clog our highways and employ millions of people, the least we can do is outfit them to be a bit less deadly...
Labels: rules and regulations, trucks accidents
posted by Unknown @ 8:22 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home