Safety Incentives Lacking, Officials Say

Technology will radically change truck safety in coming years, with innovations likely to include wireless government truck inspections.

By Frederick Kiel

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Two federal highway safety regulators said technology will radically change truck safety in coming years, with innovations likely to include wireless government inspections of every truck two or three times a day rather than the current rate of "once every five or six years."

Tim Johnson, chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Crash Avoidance and Heavy Vehicle Research Division, gave the keynote speech for the Technology & Maintenance Council's fall meeting here Sept. 23-27.

Jeff Secrist of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Office of Research and Analysis spoke at a TMC session on "Exploring Advanced Technology."

Neither Johnson nor Secrist offered any hope of government incentives to help trucking adapt to new technology.

"It's not something that our agency has the budgetary resources to tackle," Johnson said, answering questions after his talk.

"I don't see government incentives for trucking to modernize," Secrist said after his presentation. "If our agency can gather enough information to demonstrate that these new safety devices can lower truck accidents significantly, then the insurance industry may extend the same kind of discounts that they offer to cars that have extra safety devices."

Johnson said that since 1995, when U.S. traffic deaths leveled off after falling for several years, "we've been looking for the next great thing in highway safety," and technology appears to be the solution.

"We believe that technology can address most traffic accidents . . . and we are actively designing a new technology for highway safety," Johnson said.

He said the public has shown less tolerance for unsafe practices and accepted new regulations when new technological devices are proven and cost-effective. "When all of us were children, kids rode wherever they wanted in cars," Johnson said. "Now we have laws not only mandating that all small children must ride in child seats, but we also mandate which kinds of seats must be used for different sizes of children."

Johnson said trucking has to play a major role in the new safety orientation "because trucks are involved in 12% of all fatal traffic accidents annually, responsible for 5,000 deaths of the 43,443 traffic fatalities" in 2006.

He said passive methods such as cruise control, lane-departure warning systems and collision-avoidance warning devices were rapidly advancing into systems that will take action without the driver's intervention to prevent accidents.

"These systems are already functional and, once they get cheap enough, it will be very difficult for fleets to say 'no' to safety," Johnson said.

Johnson said NHTSA was putting its emphasis on truck safety and regulations on "combo vehicles, because Class 7 and 8 trucks in this class are involved in 90% of fatal truck accidents."

He also said FMCSA believes that with NHTSA's cooperation, within five to 10 years it will be possible to establish a nationwide system in which every truck will be equipped with a monitoring device enabling it to communicate with all other trucks, fleet headquarters and government devices.

Johnson added that the government plans to install roadside devices able to read the onboard monitors along all the nation's highways.

"In the long run, this system will be able to cut accidents in one of the most dangerous places for crashes that no other idea has ever solved - collisions at intersections," Johnson said.

"In the short run," he said, "the system can alert truckers to congestion problems and go a long way to solving the huge increase in road cargo we're expecting."

Johnson added that the system will also enable "some sort of automated enforcement. Right now, government inspectors might get to examine a truck once every five or six years, but the ground devices will probably be able to carry out a wireless inspection of every truck two or three times a day."

FMCSA's Secrist agreed, saying, "Safety technology is the top priority of this agency."

"We tested a wireless roadside inspection system this month in Tennessee," Secrist said. "The test demonstrated that the roadside devices can successfully download data from the truck while it is in motion."

He said FMCSA will select what it thinks is the best technology for this system by May 2008, for more extensive testing.

"Eventually, in five or 10 years, these monitoring devices can do away with spot inspections by police officers or inspectors at weigh stations," Secrist said. "If the data shows that the truck has no problem, [the driver] would get a signal that he can continue driving. If he has a problem, the device will send him a red light to tell him he has to stop where authorities can inspect the truck.

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