* Wyoming - With trucking accidents rising, industry debates when drivers should be sleeping
-- Nathan Brooks drives all over the country delivering goods as a long-haul trucker, and when I met him at a rest stop just outside of Laramie, Wyoming, he was about to start his favorite drive— back home to Alabama. Brooks has been a trucker for twenty-seven years and says the job is getting harder than it used to be... Truckers like Brooks deliver seventy percent of our domestic goods, and there are more trucks on the road now than ever. But truckers only make an average of $38,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and many are paid by how many loads they deliver. There’s an obvious incentive to drive as much as possible— when I asked Brooks how long he’s on the road each day, he got a little shifty... Brooks insists he stays under the federal limit of eleven hours of driving time a day, but answers like his make National Transportation Safety Board Chair, Chris Hart, nervous. Hart says that, since 2009, the number of trucking caused accidents and deaths has been going up steadily... One reason for that is fatigue: Hart says that fatigue causes thirteen percent of trucking accidents and contributes to more than half of them. In 2013, federal regulators introduced new rules for commercial trucking that reduced truckers’ weekly driving limits from 82 to 70 hours per week. More controversially, they also required truckers to take breaks at night... “Humans are most likely to experience fatigue during the wee hours of the morning,” Hart says. “So we wanted two periods between 1:00 am and 6:00 am when drivers would have the opportunity to sleep” ... But those rules were suspended by a Congressional lider last December, thanks largely to the lobbying efforts of the American Trucking Associations, an industry group... The new trucking regulations are suspended until the completion of a congressionally-mandated safety study. Federal officials won’t tackle regulations again until October, at the earliest. In the meantime, truckers can hit the road anytime they want. That is good news for Nathan Brooks, who couldn’t get back home fast enough...
(Photo: Truck driver Nathan Brooks) -- Laramie, Wyoming, USA - Wyoming Public Radio, by Miles Bryan - May 1, 2015
* Missouri - Graves leads examination of trucking rules
-- The accident occurred some distance from Northwest Missouri, but the location might be familiar to those who have traveled between Jefferson City and the Lake of the Ozarks... On U.S. Highway 54, a rare stoplight controls traffic on a road with a speed limit at various spots of 65 mph. Cars stopped at the light three weeks ago. A westbound Freightliner tractor-trailer coming up behind them did not... Two women, mother and daughter, died in the eight-vehicle pileup, and six other people suffered injuries.
No one can discount the horrible nature of this accident, but statistics show such incidents have become less frequent in recent years... According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the number of fatal crashes involving large trucks in Missouri has fallen from 140 in 2003 to 71 in 2013... That 49 percent decrease compares to the 18 percent decrease nationwide over the same years... North Missouri Congressman Sam Graves chairs the U.S.A. House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, want to study more safety initiatives, particularly regarding new technologies, while keeping the commercial motor-carrier industry from becoming over-regulated... One witness, Tom B. Kretsinger Jr., president and CEO of American Central Transport in Liberty, Mo., cited statistics that said driver error proved a critical reason for 87 percent of crashes in a particular federal study... He noted, however, that federal regulations sometimes unintentionally create a less safe environment on the nation’s roads... The trucking company leader said the hours-of-service provisions that mandated some driver downtime between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., a regulation suspended in December, pushed more truckers onto the roads during congested daytime hours... Another witness, Danny Schnautz, vice president of a Texas trucking company and testifying on behalf of the Operator Independent Drivers Association, also found fault with restrictive hours-of-service rules...
(Photo: Trucks travels moves along I-29) -- Jefferson City, MO, USA - St. Joseph News-Press, by Ken Newton - May 1, 2015Labels: rules and regulations, trucks accidents
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