Editorial: The Chicken and Egg in Truck Safety

It turns out that the age-old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first holds major interest in still another venue, namely in the evolution of truck safety.

Everyone favors safer trucks and safer highways. This includes trucking executives, the people who drive the trucks and those who share the road with trucks — and, you might well suppose, the insurance companies that provide the financial coverage of trucks and truckers.

As many of the stories that have appeared in Transport Topics this week and last in our “Focus on Safety” point out, technology can play a major role in reducing both the number of accidents involving trucks and the severity of those accidents.

These new technologies cost money. For the most part, fleets executives have to voluntarily add these devices to the trucks they buy. Beyond the few mandated devices required by federal law, these expenditures are made when the managers decide they are worthwhile for the economic well-being of their companies or the protection of their drivers and the goods shipped by their customers.

It might seem logical to expect that the companies that insure truckers would be delighted to encourage the industry to adopt the latest safety technologies, in the expectation that the new devices will reduce claims. It is just this kind of logic that has encouraged most automobile insurers to offer reduced rates for drivers whose vehicles have air bags or antilock braking systems.

But Transport Topics reporters have found that most insurance companies aren’t cutting rates for trucking companies that embrace these often expensive technological improvements. Rather, the insurers continue to base their rates on the historical level of claims.

It may well be prudent to wait until the fruits of technology can be harvested in the form of reduced accident and injury rates. But such “prudence” may translate into some trucking executives putting off purchases of safety equipment — in the name of prudence — until they’re told that insurance companies accept that the technologies are resulting in fewer claims.

This could add years to the process of equipping the nation’s truck fleet with available, effective safety equipment. This is a good time for insurers to join forces with their trucking customers and encourage the use of these new devices through reasonable rate reductions.