The Trucking Alliance, as well as several truck safety groups, are calling out efforts to prevent speed limiters from being required on commercial motor vehicles.
Specifically, the groups oppose the DRIVE Act, which has been introduced in the House and Senate.
The DRIVE Act would prohibit the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from promulgating any rule or regulation mandating speed limiters on heavy-duty trucks. Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., introduced HR3039 in May, and Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., introduced S2761 in July.
The Trucking Alliance, Truck Safety Coalition, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Road Safe America and the National Safety Council on Aug. 24 released statements in opposition to the DRIVE Act.
“The legislation would hinder FMCSA from fulfilling its public safety mission to reduce crashes, injuries and fatalities involving large trucks and buses, which is urgently needed as traffic fatalities remain unnecessarily high,” the groups wrote.
Speed limiter rulemaking
Last year, FMCSA issued an advance notice of supplemental proposed rulemaking that considers requiring commercial motor vehicles with a gross vehicle weight of 26,001 pounds or more to be equipped with speed-limiting devices. A top speed was not determined in the advance notice, but previous proposals floated the possibilities of 60, 65 and 68 mph.
FMCSA is expected to unveil a formal proposal that includes a top speed later this year. Truck safety groups have advocated for making the top speed 60 mph, which would mean that trucks would be forced to drive 25 mph slower than the speed limit in some areas.
The agency’s advance notice garnered significant opposition. More than 15,000 comments were filed, and the majority came from truck drivers opposed to a mandate.
Arguments for the mandate
As part of FMCSA’s justification for the mandate, FMCSA cited 2019 stats reporting nearly 900 fatal crashes involving large trucks in posted speed limits of 70 mph or more.
Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, said the DRIVE Act could lead to more traffic deaths.
“At a time when commercial motor vehicle crash fatalities and injuries are skyrocketing, our nation’s leaders should be taking action to make the roads safer for all road users, not hampering the use of proven safety solutions like speed limiters,” Chase said. “This legislation is ill-advised at best and deadly at worst.”
Steve Williams, CEO of Maverick USA and president of The Trucking Alliance USA, also sees the benefit of speed limiters.
“About 98% of the 62,000 trucks operated by Trucking Alliance carriers already use speed limiters, because it’s safe for our drivers,” Williams said. “The science is clear. It takes an 80,000-pound tractor-trailer rig much farther to stop when going 80 miles per hour than it does at 65 or 70 miles per hour. Everybody needs to slow down, and allowing FMCSA to pursue its rulemaking is the right thing to do.”
Deeper dive into the stats
FMCSA’s statistic about nearly 900 fatal crashes involving large trucks in posted speed limits of 70 mph or more provides little to no insight into how much a speed limiter mandate would have helped in these crashes.
The agency told Land Line last year that it doesn’t know the traveling speeds of the large trucks involved in the crashes or if reducing those speeds to one of the proposed top speeds would have prevented the fatalities. The agency also said it doesn’t know how many of those trucks were already speed-limited.
A deeper dive into the 2019 statistics shows that large trucks were involved in about 12% of fatality crashes. Not only were trucks not involved in the majority of fatal crashes, but they also typically were not the problem even in the crashes that involved them. According to FMCSA, 90.6% of the truck drivers involved in fatal crashes in 2019 did not receive a moving violation. Even more, the truck drivers in these cases had no driver-related factors recorded 67.1% of the time.
Conversely, only 40% of passenger vehicle drivers had no factors cited to them in fatal crashes.
It should also be noted that a large truck is defined as a truck with a gross vehicle weight rating greater than 10,000 pounds. In 2019, about 25% of the large truck-involved fatal crashes were attributed to ones weighing 26,000 pounds or less. Under FMCSA’s proposal, the speed limiter mandate would apply only to commercial motor vehicles weighing 26,001 pounds or more.
And while companies like Maverick may already use speed-limiting devices, the devices do not put an end to all speeding. According to information from FMCSA’s Compliance Safety Accountability website, Maverick had 110 speeding violations in the past two years. Eighteen of those violations were for at least 15 mph faster than the speed limit. In addition, the carrier had 127 crashes included in the CSA SMS data as preventable during that span.
The Trucking Alliance is comprised of large fleets Maverick, Bison, Cargo Transporters, Dupre Logistics, J.B. Hunt, KLLM Transport Services, Knight Transportation, May Trucking Company, Schneider, Swift and U.S. Xpress. Over the past two years, they had combined totals of 3,406 preventable crashes and 3,481 speeding violations. While the companies have a large number of trucks, these totals show that speed-limiting devices don’t put a stop to speeding or crashes.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association argued that safety is not the Trucking Alliance’s goal when it comes to speed limiters.
“The Trucking Alliance is wrapping their opposition to the DRIVE Act in some sort of perverse argument about safety,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said. “The number of speeding tickets and crashes by their member carriers clearly show that speed limiters are not the silver bullet. If they were truly concerned, they would pay their drivers by the hour and reduce the pressure to speed in locations where it’s clearly unsafe.”
Arguments against a mandate
While it’s unclear how many crashes would be prevented by reducing the speed of large trucks, some research suggests that creating a large speed differential between trucks and cars would increase the likelihood of a crash.
OOIDA, which has more than 150,000 members and represents the rights of individual truck drivers, argues that roads are safer when all vehicles are traveling at the same speed.
The OOIDA Foundation points to research from Dr. Steven Johnson and the University of Arkansas that says the frequency of interactions with other vehicles increases 227% when traveling 10 mph below the speed of traffic.
In addition to worrying about drastic speed differentials, opponents of a mandate point to additional stress placed on drivers, conflicts with driver retention goals and a potential increase in rear-end crashes.
It also is being touted as a states’ rights issue.
Citing concerns over speed differentials, many states have eliminated laws that made the posted speed limit for cars faster than for heavy-duty trucks.
Brecheen, who introduced the DRIVE Act in the House, said that if FMCSA is allowed to determine trucks’ top speed, it would remove a state’s ability to govern its roads.
OOIDA agreed.
“The ATA, Trucking Alliance and other speed-limiter supporters believe they’re better suited to determine safe speeds for all highway users, rather than state DOTs,” said Jay Grimes, OOIDA’s director of federal affairs. “Congress delegated this authority to the states nearly 30 years ago, and they have been moving away from the dangerous split speeds the mandate would create ever since.”
The DRIVE Act has 27 co-sponsors in the House and five in the Senate. LL
Land Line Managing Editor Jami Jones contributed to this report.
