An HOS Rule That Works
This Editorial appears in the April 18 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
The truck-involved fatality rate on the nation’s highways has hit a new low in the latest data provided by the Department of Transportation.
Now that DOT finally has tallied the number of miles driven during 2009, we can calculate that for every 100 million miles that year, there were 1.17 deaths in accidents involving trucks. That is the lowest fatality rate since the federal government starting compiling the statistics in 1975.
That rate is well below the 2008 rate of 1.37 per 100 million miles, which also set a record low when it was calculated.
This good news brings us back to a point we’ve made often and loudly: How can DOT be considering altering its hours-of-service rule when it has ushered in the safest era for the trucking industry in the nation’s history?
It’s time for the federal government to ignore the histrionics of a few interest groups with their own axes to grind and pay more attention to DOT’s own safety data.
As ATA’s President Bill Graves told DOT officials: “Since FMCSA began its efforts to revise these rules, we have said the current rules are working. The Obama administration’s own data now supports that belief.”
Graves told DOT that since the current HOS rule went into effect in 2004, “the truck-involved fatality rate has dropped by 36% — nearly twice as fast as the overall fatality rate on our highways — and that’s not a coincidence.”
While the data are from 2009, because of the lag in compiling the fatality and miles-driven data from all 50 states, the information provides continuing evidence that safety is improving, and especially for trucks.
Earlier, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that fatalities in truck-involved crashes in 2009 had reached a record low 3,380, including 503 truck drivers, in 2,987 separate accidents.
After the Federal Highway Administration recently reported that trucks had traveled 288 billion miles during 2009, ATA was able to calculate the fatality rate.
The federal data showed that while truck miles traveled had declined 7.4% in 2009 compared with 2008, the fatality rate declined 14.1%.
Dave Osiecki, ATA’s senior vice president of policy, said last week that advocates of altering the HOS rule that went into effect in 2004 “noisily asserted these rules would lead to increases in crashes and fatalities, but those baseless predictions have not come true. We are left to conclude that these rules are doing their job to improve highway safety.”
Save this HOS rule.
