Editorial: Trucking’s Leading Role in Safety

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nnette Sandberg, the departing head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, paid trucking some very nice compliments during a recent interview in which she summarized her three-year tenure.

Sandberg, who will step down as FMCSA administrator on March 4, told Transport Topics that her time in Washington had convinced her that trucking is the agency’s ally, not its adversary, in the drive to make our highways safer. (Click here for news story.)

“There are people who try to make the industry out to be the enemy,” she said. But she believes that trucking “is not the enemy. A majority of the industry wants . . . to follow the regulations and be good partners.”

In her Feb.1 resignation letter to President Bush, Sandberg said one of her proudest accomplishments in the job was the reduction of fatal crashes involving trucks.

During the TT interview earlier this month in Tampa, Fla., Sandberg said it was “very significant” that the number of truck-related fatalities has fallen to “the lowest [level] since 1975,” even though the number of trucks on the road and the number of miles they are driving have risen.

While Sandberg’s words are most welcome, trucking cannot rest on its laurels when it comes to improving highway safety.

It was in that regard that American Trucking Associations’ board of directors this month approved a policy to encourage the manufacturers of heavy-duty trucks and engines to limit the speed of vehicles to 68 miles per hour.

ATA President Bill Graves summed up the board’s decision, reached during the group’s Winter Leadership Meeting, when he said: “With speeding as a factor in one-third of all fatal highway crashes, it makes all the sense in the world to work to reduce this number.”

ATA reported that “nearly 75% of the trucks evaluated” in a recent study “already had speed governors, and that most were set at 70 mph or lower.”

Graves said, “There has been a growing sense within the trucking industry for the need to slow down the large truck population, as well as all traffic.”

When asked what advice she would offer her successor, Sandberg said it clearly and succinctly: “Don’t ever forget what the mission is” — improving safety.

Trucking will surely continue to play a key role in making that mission a success.

This editorial appears in the Feb. 20 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.