While there are no doubt crashes and fatalities that are the fault of the truck driver, it’s been shown ad nauseam in past studies, data analysis, reporting, etc., that passenger-car drivers are the at-fault party in the large majority of accidents on the roads.
There was a moment during the first day of the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee meeting a couple weeks ago that stuck out in this context. Its new chairman, Stephen Owings of his own self-styled highway-safety-advocacy group Road Safe America, reminded the committee of the ultimate goal of those who improve safety on he highways. “There’s a lot of talk now in the press and so forth from different sources about trying to get to zero deaths on the highway system,” said Owings. A primary, though not the only, recent source for that goal, at least in the trucking-regulatory realm, is Anne Ferro. I’ve heard her say it many times. She typically acknowledges that, though detractors may dismiss it as a kind of pie-in-the-sky sort of goal, it’s one that she takes seriously as the nation’s top commercial-vehicle-safety regulator.
Owings, however, went on to make a comparison between truckers, who share the roads with the motoring public, and airline pilots and their industry — “It seems like it would be worthwhile for a study to be done and take a look at the airline industry,” Owings said, where statistics show “pretty close to zero deaths” most years, “and consider what would have to happen to FMCSA to achieve what the FAA has achieved.”
Readers were quick to comment on my Facebook page in response to a post about such a notion.
Earl “Bugsy” Milroy: In order to achieve zero highway fatalities, there would have to be zero vehicles on said highways.
Daniel McCreary: What Bugsy said. Life in a free country involves risks, and we must, at some point, decide that we are willing to allow risky endeavors to maintain a certain level of freedom and economic activity.
It’s important to keep in mind that the ultimate goal of the MCSAC is to deliver consensus advice to the FMCSA — where such is not possible (and it’s seemed next to impossible at meetings I’ve attended over the past couple years, though I’ve missed several), the MCSAC has voted on various recommendations and sent both majority and dissenting views to FMCSA — and in the case of the latest meeting, to Congress.
