New federal truck safety rules are closer than ever. But there are still speed bumps ahead

WASHINGTON — Safety advocates have spent years pushing for new technologies to address a sharp rise in deaths from truck crashes — up 48% in a decade.

Now, after fatalities rose for the eighth straight year, federal transportation officials are moving ahead with new rules designed to make trucks less deadly.

“We have an administration that is willing to take some positive steps forward to protect lives,” said Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition. “We are experiencing a truck crash fatality crisis we have not witnessed in generations.”

As motorists flood the highways over Thanksgiving — the busiest travel holiday, according to AAA — two federal regulatory agencies are looking at whether to require new trucks to have automatic emergency braking, or AEB, systems. The agencies, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, also are considering requiring devices that limit how fast trucks can go. Both regulations already are in place in many other countries.

“Thank God Almighty they finally got moving to catch us up with the rest of the civilized world,” said Steve Owings, whose son Cullum was killed in 2002 when a speeding truck slammed into his stopped car on Interstate 81 in Virginia.

“There’s very little question that the speed limiter along with AEB would have saved his life,” said Owings, co-founder of Road Safe America and board member of the Institute for Safer Trucking. “There wouldn’t even have been a crash.”

But the 150,000-member Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association has come out against the new rules, expressing concerns about how foolproof the technology is. And the group has found a receptive audience on Capitol Hill. House Republican legislation funding the U.S. Transportation Department through Sept. 30, 2024, would ban the agency from moving ahead with either proposed regulation.

The debate is front and center in an industry that employed 3.5 million drivers, carried 11.5 billion tons of freight, and reported $940.8 billion in revenue in 2022, according to the American Trucking Associations, a trade group.

In that same year, 5,887 people were killed in crashes involving trucks weighing more than 10,000 pounds, preliminary National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics show.

That was up 48% from 3,981 in 2013, and the equivalent of 23 Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners crashing and killing everyone on board.

“We cannot and must not accept that roadway fatalities are somehow an inevitable part of life in America,” the Transportation Department said in a statement.

Pennsylvania last year recorded 145 fatal crashes involving heavy trucks — those weighing more than 26,000 pounds — the most in five years, according to the state Department of Transportation.

In 2021, the last year for which statistics were available, 162 people died in Pennsylvania crashes involving trucks weighing more than 10,000 pounds, 10th highest among the 50 states, according to the Truck Safety Coalition, a partnership between Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways and Parents Against Tired Truckers.

Still, preliminary numbers released earlier this month showed an 11% decline in truck-related fatalities during the first six months of 2023 compared to 2022, from 2,862 last year to 2,549 this year. If the trend continues for the remainder of 2023, it would be only the second time in more than a decade that deaths in crashes involving trucks were lower than the previous year.

Even so, on a stretch of Interstate 70 in Ohio about 2 1/2 hours west of Pittsburgh, a semi truck two weeks ago smashed into the rear of a bus filled with high school students. Six people were killed and 18 injured.

Safety advocates said the proposed rules would help prevent such crashes, including by tired or distracted drivers.

“When you’re looking for solutions to bring down truck crash deaths and injuries, we have the answer,” said veteran traffic safety advocate Jackie Gillan, co-founder of the Truck Safety Coalition. “It’s not like we’re waiting for this to be invented. We have it.”

What has been missing is the political will.

FMCSA and NHTSA first announced in 2011 that they would consider requiring speed limiters in large trucks. The agencies proposed a rule to that effect in 2016. Likewise, NHTSA first agreed in 2015 to consider requiring automatic emergency braking in new trucks.

But the federal agencies in charge of truck safety never followed through, facing opposition from parts of the trucking industry, some members of Congress, and presidential administrations that sought to reduce regulations.

The process began anew in 2021. Congress demanded certain new safety rules when it passed President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law later that year.

“It would have been a missed opportunity to fix and modernize our infrastructure if we didn’t also make it safer,” said former U.S. Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., who sat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee when the bill was being written. “One of the biggest concerns I heard from constituents in my time in Congress when it came to highway safety was the growing density of large trucks. I felt that these were common sense ideas, well worth the cost given the lives that would be saved.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg used funds from the law to develop a National Roadway Safety Strategy, which was released in January 2022. The plan called for new rules requiring automatic emergency braking on new heavy trucks and new standards for rear underguards to prevent cars from being wedged underneath trailers, while noting that “unsafe speeds are now a well-documented and understood factor in death and injury.”

In April 2022, FMCSA cited the safety strategy in announcing it would look at requiring speed-limiting devices in new trucks. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said that in truck crashes on roads where the speed limit was identified, almost 40% of deaths in 2019, about 1,500 fatalities, occurred when the posted speed limit was 65 mph or higher.

FMCSA followed that up this June by joining NHTSA in proposing a rule requiring automatic emergency braking systems in trucks weighing more than 10,000 pounds, citing requirements of the infrastructure law. NHTSA estimated that the proposed rule would prevent more than 19,000 crashes, save 155 lives, and prevent 8,814 injuries every year.

“We’ve worked with — I’m embarrassed to say — how many administrations now,” Owings said. “All of them act like they want to improve safety and they say they want to improve safety, but this one actually seems to be doing something.”

Biden’s first wife and baby daughter were killed and his two sons badly injured when their car was hit by a tractor-trailer in Delaware in 1972.

Another safety rule required under the infrastructure law — new standards for rear underride guards to prevent cars from being wedged under tractor-trailers — was released in June 2022. NHTSA also set up an advisory committee to look at whether side guards should be required.

That rule came eight years after NHTSA first said it would look at strengthening the standards for rear underguards, required on truck trailers since 1998. Safety advocates, though, said the new standards fell short of what was needed, and even below what top trailer manufacturers already were producing.

Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety asked the Transportation Department to reconsider the new rule in August 2022, general counsel Peter Kurdock said.

None of those rules might have seen the light of day had not Congress not demanded action, Gillan said. Other safety improvements, such as seat belts, air bags, head injury protection, and backup cameras, occurred because Congress passed legislation insisting on them, she said.

“The most effective strategy to get the agency to move is to put in a bill and get it signed into law,” she said.

The debate over speed limiters and automatic emergency braking pits the two largest trucking associations against each other, for now. The American Trucking Associations supports the idea of both technologies, though Dan Horvath, senior vice president of regulatory affairs and safety policy, said the group would wait until the final rules are issued before deciding whether to support them.

“We don’t even know what speed (the Department of Transportation) is going to propose,” Horvath said. “It would be pretty premature for us to oppose a rule that we haven’t even read yet.”

OOIDA, on the other hand, opposes both proposed rules.

“They’re trying to do something, but unfortunately they’re trying to do something that’s easy,” said Lewie Pugh, executive vice president of the OOIDA. “But it’s not going to fix the problem they’re trying to fix. Drivers have been telling them what to do for years and years and years.”

Their big ask is more and better training.

“It takes 1,600 hours to become a barber in Missouri,” Pugh said. “To drive a truck, all you have to do is pass a test. Not a lot of people die from haircuts.”

Horvath acknowledged the need for training but said technology has to be a part of reducing crashes, too.

“Training isn’t the only solution,” he said. “There are numerous solutions, some of them being safety technologies, not to mention a focus on passenger vehicles. It’s a collaborative effort. It’s not finger pointing. It’s looking at all highway users and looking at ways to improve highway safety.”

But Pugh questioned how effective the technology really is. For example, he asked, can automatic emergency braking compensate for the sloshing of liquid in a tanker truck, or wandering livestock in a trailer, or on a slick, icy road?

Meanwhile, airline pilots are trained to fly their aircraft even if their systems go down, he said. Pugh cited the example of US Airways Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, who had the training to land his plane in the Hudson River in 2019 after both engines failed after a bird strike, saving the lives of all 155 passengers and crew.

“There isn’t a trucker out there who wouldn’t embrace technology if it worked,” he said. “I understand how these things sound good. … What we’re doing is coming up with all these safety gimmicks to put on the truck so we can train the driver less. The first line of defense in trucking safety is training.”

One argument in favor of a new rule is that those devices already are standard equipment in many trucks, and companies already are using them.

“Every new heavy truck rolling off the assembly line now already has AEB in it,” Kurdock said. “There’s no reason for the agency to not complete this rulemaking.”

‘If it’s going to help save one life, it’s worth it’

Pitt Ohio, a Pittsburgh-based trucking company with 1,900 drivers and 1,530 trucks, has automatic braking and speed limiters in its trucks, said Jeff Mercadante, vice president of safety.

“They will start braking before the driver can even recognize something that may be happening,” he said. “Collision mitigation systems are one of the best technologies in our vehicles today.”

As for speed limiters, “I don’t think a truck should be out there going 80 miles per an hour down the road,” he said. “It’s a huge safety concern, not only for the trucking company but the public.”

In fact, Pitt Ohio goes even further and has technology in its trucks that warns drivers when they’re drifting over into another lane, Mercandante said. That’s another technology that safety advocates have been pushing for.

To get their messages across, trucking groups and companies spent more on lobbying during the first nine months of 2023 than during the same period in any other year going back to 2018, according to the research group OpenSecrets.

They also increased contributions to lawmakers from their political action committees, as they focused not only on safety but other issues such as overtime pay for truckers.

Donations from industry PACs rose 39%, from $399,550 during the first nine months of 2021 to $557,000 during the same period this year, according to OpenSecrets.

The ATA brings its state affiliates, including the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association, to Capitol Hill to meet with elected officials. OOIDA gets its members to go to its website and send messages online.

“They have one of the most effective grass-roots lobbying of any group I’ve worked with,” Gillan, the safety advocate often on the other side, said of OOIDA. “There are trucking companies and truckers in every single district.”

The Truck Safety Coalition hasn’t had a registered lobbyist since 2011, but it hasn’t been quiet on the issue. Cahalan said the group has asked its 300-plus volunteers to call their lawmakers, urging support for speed limiters and automatic emergency braking.

“They’ve heard from our victims, no doubt about it,” Cahalan said. “The greatest number of stories we have heard is they are waiting in slowed or stopped traffic and a semi comes barreling down the road and hits a stopped car at 70 mph. This is going to really flip the script and save a lot of lives.”

One of them is Eileen Miller of Scranton, who also is a familiar figure in Harrisburg, pushing for state legislation named for her son, which would ban the use of handheld devices. Her son Paul Miller Jr., then 21, was killed in 2010 in Hamilton Township when a speeding tractor-trailer crossed over the median on Route 33 and hit his car head-on. The truck driver was fidgeting with his cell phone at the time.

Miller said automatic braking and speed limiting systems could have prevented the crash, even if the driver was distracted.

“If it’s going to help save one life, it’s worth it and my son did not die in vain,” Miller said.

While her son’s body lay in the morgue, she said she “whispered in his ear that I would fight for change. I made him that promise. … These things are so preventable. That’s the hard part. These are not accidents. They are all preventable.”

Even so, the House transportation spending bill now on the floor would block the federal government from moving ahead with either proposal, to the dismay of safety advocates.

“Unfortunately, there are people in Congress who buy into the argument that these mandates for safety are somehow a cost,” said Harry Adler, principal at the Institute for Safer Trucking. “They should go back to their district and look at families who lost loved ones in crashes that could have been prevented.”

The transportation spending bill has yet to pass the House and the Senate is working on its own version. Meanwhile, the temporary legislation that will fund the government into next year contains none of those provisions.

Neither the House Appropriations Committee nor Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., who successfully offered an amendment blocking one of the proposed rules, responded to requests for comment.

The rule on speed limiters could come out next month, with automatic emergency braking next year. But if the rules are delayed and a new administration takes office in January 2025, the process once again could be shelved and proponents of new safety technologies could find themselves back at the beginning

“They need to get these rulemakings done. and they need to get them done now,” said Gillan, the truck safety advocate. “It’s time that we mandated them and have every single truck on the road equipped with this technology. Then you’re going to see reduced truck crashes, deaths and injuries.

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