Government Report Shows Safety Issues with Trucking Industry
The government agency charged with trying to reduce injury accidents caused by big trucks and making the trucking industry safer recently released their annual report to Congress on the level of efficiency in the trucking industry in the U.S. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is the government agency that was created to improve the safety level of semi trucks, their drivers and the trucking companies. As part of that responsibility, the FMCSA is trying to partner the trucking industry with the wireless technology industry to improve efficiencies in the industry and correspondingly, safety.
However, the recent report found that there were serious inefficiencies in the trucking industry that surely contribute to safety problems and injury accidents on the roads. The report also found that the volume of freight transported by semi trucks is likely to increase dramatically going forward, which makes the need to correct safety issues more urgent and difficult.
The report indicated that the trucking industry has deficiencies in the following areas related to safety:
- too much waiting at the shipper and receiver, empty trailers and poor routing, which may cause a driver with a deadline to drive faster and less safely
- excessive speeding by semi truck drivers
- tampering with truck components designed to regulate the semi truck's speed
- poor maintenance of semi trucks and trailers
- manual reporting of mileage and hours which leads to false reporting and semi truck drivers driving too many miles and hours which leads to fatigue
- defective equipment on semis, specifically tires, and equipment breakdowns
These are serious safety issues with semi trucks, truck drivers and trucking companies that the FMCSA will continue to have to address as each of these deficiencies, and any combination of them, are likely factors in the number of serious injury and fatal accidents involving big trucks on the roads each year. One of the challenges mentioned in the report is that many of the semi truck drivers work for themselves or other small trucking companies and are unable to afford the time and resources to implement new technology, even though the technology would improve safety and efficiency.
