Late on Friday, Senator Cory Booker introduced The Truck Safety Act (S. 1739). The bill would update Reagan-era insurance minimums; pay truckers for their time instead of their mileage; and, make commercial trucks use some of the same safety technology as passenger cars. Fixing the minimum amount of insurance for trucks The minimum amount of [...]
Last month, the House of Representatives quietly passed HR 2577. It is a bill to fund transportation—but it has a provision to stop the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from updating the minimum insurance policy for commercial trucks ... an insurance minimum that hasn’t been updated since 1980. See Congress is wrong: why the minimum insurance [...]
In June, the US House of Representatives passed a transportation bill – HR 2577– with a strange provision: it stops the Department of Transportation from updating minimum trucking insurance requirements. Commercial truck insurance minimums haven’t changed in 30 years. The federal government sets a “floor”: a minimum amount of insurance coverage commercial trucks must carry. [...]
This is a “forward collision avoidance and mitigation braking” system. Volvo shows how the auto-braking system could prevent thousands of rear-end truck crashes a year When radar and sensors detect a slow-moving vehicle or stopped car ahead, the “F-CAM” system warns the truck driver. If the driver doesn’t brake, the system takes over [...]
The first self-driving semi truck in the U.S. is officially on the road in Nevada. Freightliner, the creator of the autonomous commercial truck, compares the Highway Pilot system to the autopilot on commercial airplanes. The semi-truck can be switched to autonomous autopilot on the highway, and it uses stereoscopic cameras and radar sensors. The truck can [...]
It could have been much, much worse. Last week, an oversized load on a flatbed semi-truck struck a bridge in Seattle. The truck was on bottom ramp, heading south on the Alaskan Way Viaduct. If you’re not familiar with the Viaduct, here’s what it looks like from the side. The oversized load was on the lower [...]
Trucking companies must drug-test all applicants when hiring truck drivers. A driver must be tested again if he or she is involved in a truck accident crash that results in a serious injury or fatality. Those results are shared with The Department of Transportation (DOT), which regulates the trucking industry. Currently, The Department of Transportation (DOT) [...]
The images are shocking. The first collision was between a jackknifed semi-truck, and a passenger truck driven by Kaleb Whitby. His vehicle spun around and flipped upon hitting the semi-truck, and he could see another tractor-trailer coming directly at him. Saturday’s semi-truck pile-up in Eastern Oregon involved between 50 and 70 cars, according to Oregon [...]
Commercial truckers who admitted to falling asleep while driving are believed to cause more than 750 fatalities and 20,000 injuries every year. In truth, that estimate is likely quite low. It’s almost impossible to know how many truck accidents crashes sleepy truckers cause. The same is true for car accidents crashes: very few drivers admit to falling [...]
The trucking industry is getting a holiday bonus from the U.S. Congress. The federal spending bill just passed for 2015 includes a provision that will undo many of the trucking safety rule changes the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) implemented last year. The current trucking safety rules—mandating a 30-minute break every 8 hours, and [...]
