Editorial: Improving Motor Carrier Safety

Federal figures released last week show that during 1998, U.S. truckers had their safest year in history, as their fatal accident rate declined to 2.33 crashes per 100 million miles driven.

The decline was 8.3%, more than double the 3.6% drop in the fatal accident rate experienced by all vehicles, according to the federal government. In 1997, the fatal accident rate for trucks was 2.54 per 100 million miles driven.

In addition, according to the statistics prepared by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the total number of fatalities declined last year by 22 from 1997, even though U.S. truckers drove 4.5 billion more miles in 1998 than in the previous year.

These results show real progress for an industry dedicated to making the nation’s highways safer, and show that trucking is taking its safety mandate seriously. And these successes should only fuel the industry’s drive for greater improvements, because 5,274 truck-related fatalities are still too many.

Also last week, it became known that the Senate won’t mark up the bill the House passed in October to create the National Motor Carrier Administration before next year. The press of other business has slowed the Senate.

While we’re disappointed at what we expect will be a short delay, there appears to be strong sentiment in favor of the legislation in the Senate, and we expect the bill will be enacted in coming months.

The separate modal administration will bring new energy to federal motor carrier safety programs, and we look forward to working closely with the new agency.

And because reform of the hours of service is such an important component of federal safety efforts, we believe the proposal should come from the leaders of the new modal administration, and not from the Office of Motor Carrier Safety, which will be phased out to make way for the new agency.

While this may cause a short delay in issuing the rulemaking, we believe it will actually speed up final implementation of the standards. Congress is unlikely to adopt rules that don’t come from the agency they will have just created to run federal motor carrier safety programs.