Don’t Play Politics with Road Safety
Last month, a fatal crash in Oregon put a spotlight on the gravely important issue of truck safety. Tragically, a California truck driver – who was later charged with manslaughter and driving under the influence of intoxicants – drove off Interstate 5 in Albany and slammed into a passenger van filled with farmworkers, killing seven.
As co-founder of the Institute for Safer Trucking, I hear horrific stories, like this every day. According to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the United States witnessed a staggering increase in truck crash fatalities, with a shocking 71 percent rise between 2009 and 2021. Every year, approximately 5,000 Americans die in truck-involved crashes - that’s the equivalent of a 747-plane crashing every month. With truck crash fatalities at their highest levels since 1981, our mission has never been more critical: reducing truck crash injuries and fatalities, supporting survivors and families, and raising awareness about crucial truck safety issues.
Despite the worsening state of truck safety in the United States, there are proven tools that exist today to reverse the trends of rising truck crashes, injuries, and deaths. Technological innovations, like Automated Emergency Braking and Lane Keeping Assist, are readily available and have been shown to reduce crashes. These driver-assistance technologies of today serve as the building blocks for the technology of tomorrow that could have an even greater impact in making our roads safer – fully autonomous vehicles. Considering the Department of Transportation has found that human error is involved in most crashes that occur on our roads, we are hopeful that full autonomy can address human-driven crash factors, such as distraction, impairment, speeding, and fatigue, that have persisted with catastrophic consequences.
To successfully improve truck safety in the future, we should embrace technological advancements and innovation, while taking a cautious approach that ensures careful evaluation and consideration of the technology’s potential impact on road safety.
Unfortunately, there are attempts to disrupt the process of thoughtful, safety-conscious innovation and predetermine the safety outcomes of autonomous trucks. For instance, California’s Assembly Bill 316 would, in effect, block driverless truck operations in California. This bill would bar the California Highway Patrol and Department of Motor Vehicles from considering driverless truck permits until 2029, then impose a complex process to secure regulatory permission to operate.
Assembly Bill 316’s proponents do not appear to be driven by concerns with safety but instead seemed more concerned with protecting the status quo. While protecting truck driver jobs is an understandable goal, Assembly Bill 316 fails to address the real labor issues that exist in the trucking industry: lack of access to safe parking, pressures to deliver regardless of conditions, and inadequate and unclear pay due to pay-per-mile and exemptions from overtime pay. All of these issues help contribute to incredibly high turnover rates for the truckload segment and inexperienced drivers to fill the remaining seats.
Driving trucks is a tough yet essential job. It requires people who elevate the needs of the many over their personal needs, tasking truckers to leave their families for weeks to earn a living to deliver the goods in our stores. We should be looking for opportunities to supplement the work of professional drivers and figuring out the role they can play in a modern trucking industry, rather than continuing to ignore the problems that contribute to experienced drivers leaving the industry and dissuading new drivers from choosing this career.
Based on our organization’s experiences, roadway safety policy should be in the hands of roadway safety experts and professionals, who work closely with safety advocates, law enforcement, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and other experts.
Reasonable people can disagree about when driverless trucks are going to be ready for public deployment, and what responsibilities technology developers have to educate the public, share data, and explain their operational models. Yet it would be unwise to slam the door shut on this technology at its inception before it has had the opportunity to develop through the proper process, which should involve public input.
Each day, we tragically witness the unnecessary loss of numerous lives on our nation's roads because of preventable truck crashes caused by human error. In the face of this daily challenge, we have to stay focused on pursuing all available avenues to make our roads safer. That is why we believe that technologies, like autonomous trucks, have potential and should be permitted to be developed with robust oversight and reporting, and be allowed to go through the rulemaking process.
John Lannen is co-chair of the Institute for Safer Trucking, an advocacy organization for truck safety issues and resource for families of truck crash victims and survivors.
