Updates, updates, updates
So, what’s new? I apologize for not posting sooner. I guess I’ve been pretty busy. First, for those of you who have sent me questions: thank you for your interest in Arnold Safety. If I haven’t responded yet, like I said, I’m pretty busy. Use of the word, “please” also makes it more likely I will respond. Offering to pay makes it much more likely I will respond…. or at least respond more thoroughly.
In the news: there was a giant bus crash in the Bronx, NY where 15 people were killed. In the all the articles I saw, they still haven’t pinned down what happened. The driver may or may not have fallen asleep, or he may or may not have been run off the road by another truck. Then apparently there was another bus crash in New Jersey a few days later, killing a few more people, so right now the DOT has the heat on all the bus companies.
DOT’s hours of service proposal marches merrily along. The comment period is closed; now we wait for the final verdict from DOT. Remember, DOT means FMCSA…. I use the two interchangeably. I will be shocked if it’s anything other than what’s already been announced. Yes, we have a GOP house, but as The Who said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
DOT moved back the deadline for commenting on the EOBR mandate to May 23. I thought about commenting, but what’s the point? My comment was going to center around the crash rates for the last 30 years. I poked around the Internet, and found NHTSA’s fatalities for both car and truck accidents littered here, there, and everywhere on the Internet. After some effort, I pieced the number of crashes together. What I found was the number of fatalities caused by truck crashes since 1980 has dropped very slowly until about 2007, then it has dropped much more quickly.
So, I then compared it to the number of fatalities caused by car crashes since 1980. Those fatalities have dropped very slowly until about 2007, then they dropped much more quickly. In fact, the rate of decline in both fataility rates were virtually identical.
So, what conclusion did I draw from this? As we all know, commercial motor vehicles and their drivers are highly regulated, and becoming more so every day. Therefore, the number of deaths from truck crashes should have dropped at a much more dramatic rate than deaths from car accidents, as car drivers are for the most part, unregulated. After all, in car drivers, we have teenagers, 90 year olds, drug addicts, drunks, drag racers, road ragers, and people who don’t speak English. In short, it’s an unregulated free-for-all.
This is not the case, however. The number of deaths in car crashes and truck crashes have moved in tandem. I conclude the extensive efforts of the DOT over the past 30 years to regulate commercial vehicles for safety have largely been for naught. Otherwise, you would see a greater improvement in the number of truck deaths.
I considered creating charts, graphs, writing up my conclusions, and commenting on DOT’s new laws, but then I thought, “why?” There’s a 90% chance they would not even bother to address the comment, and if they did, they would either invent some new statistics showing me how much safer I am because of their rules. I thought about sending it to my GOP Congressman and Senator, but considering these guys can only find $61 billion to cut in a $3.8 trillion budget….. I might as well talk to the wall. Republicans, Democrats: two sides of the same coin. Big government and Much Bigger government.
Back to DOT having nothing to do with safety: what about the Bronx bus crash? 15 people are dead, how can I say DOT is not safety related? Well, from what I have read, they have not found a violation of the safety regulations which led to the crash. That may change. Nevertheless, many crashes… in fact the vast majority of truck crashes do not involve a violation of the safety regulations. They are accidents. Most are the fault of the car who cut off, or otherwise ran into the truck. Many of the rest can be attributed to carelessness, such as a driver dozing off, even though he is well within his duty hours. Sometimes a driver runs off the road, or into another vehicle simply because he’s not paying attention.
If I were King, I’d leave the current rules alone. Just leave it alone. But, since there’s no danger of my becoming King, the regulatory onslaught will continue. You know what’s really funny? Once the economy picks up, maybe in 5 or 6 years, the number of highway fatalities will go up, despite all these draconian safety measures they are now enacting. How do I know this? The number of people killed on the roads is much more a function of how many people are on the roads, rather than the safety regulations. There was a dramatic drop in deaths over the past 2-3 years, not because of anything DOT did, but because we suffered the worst economic downturn since the Depression.
