Safety advocacy groups continue to argue that commercial motor vehicle drivers pose a great danger to road safety. Organizations and political leaders tend to give in to your suggestions regarding their own agendas.
Beatings of our professional truckers have become all too common and it’s time to set the record straight, using factual statistics.
SafeRoads.org is one of the largest voices condemning professional truck drivers and motor carriers regarding highway safety, often mentioning that fatigue is a “contributing factor in up to 30-40% of all heavy truck accidents”. The problem with this statement is that it is completely false.
Today, the truth is that commercial trucks are involved in 2.4% of all car accidents and more than 80% of those accidents are the fault of the non-commercial driver. Additionally, only 16% of all truck driving accidents are due to the truck driver’s fault and of those fatality related accidents, only 4% of truck driving accidents are fatigue related.
In fact, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has finally declared that “fatigue” ranks low on the list of truck accident causes. According to the FMCSA, truck driver fatigue was a factor in only 1.4% of all fatal truck accidents, this comes from the FMCSA’s own Analysis Division in its report: “2009: Historic Truck Accident Declines.”
Because safety groups continually discuss the dangerous safety risks of motor carriers and their truck drivers, it is important to provide real statistics related to trucking accidents and fatality rates, compared to car drivers on record.
The following is a list of 5 major motor carriers showing the miles traveled per year, reported accidents, the number of fatalities resulting from those accidents (average), and the average number of accidents and fatalities per year, per 100,000 miles traveled:
Motor Carrier Safety
one. National Schneider
Miles per year: 1,152,688,659
Reported crashes: 463
Deaths: 16.5
Accidents per 100,000 miles: 0.40
Deaths per 100,000 miles: .0014
two. Carrier Crete
Miles per year: 524,000,000
Reported accidents: 198.5
Deaths: 7.5
Accidents per 100,000 miles: 0.37
Deaths per 100,000 miles: .0014
3. J.B. Hunt
Miles per year: 825,156,529
Reported accidents: 332.5
Deaths: 10.5
Accidents per 100,000 miles: 0.40
Deaths per 100,000 miles: .0013
Four. Major
Miles per year: 542,785,567
Reported accidents: 253.5
Deaths: 6.5
Accidents per 100,000 miles: 0.47
Deaths per 100,000 miles: 0.0012
5. Con-Way Load (2009 Report)
Miles per year: 371,073,137
Reported accidents: 141
Deaths: 3
Accidents per 100,000 miles: 0.38
Deaths per 100,000 miles: 0.0008
When calculating a “standard frequency rate”, 100,000 miles is used as the standard. When analyzing accident and fatality rates among car and truck drivers, the average number of miles driven in a year must be counted in the equation.
A motorist who drives 100,000 miles a year has 20 times more risk of accident exposure than a driver who logs 10,000 miles in a year. The more miles you spend behind the wheel, the accident/fatality factor will obviously increase.
Who would you consider to be the safest driver? The car driver with one accident in two years after 24,000 miles or the truck driver with two accidents in two years after 200,000 miles?
Automobile driver safety record
Now, let’s compare the overall accident and fatality rates with the non-commercial driver:
- As of May 19, 2010, the fatality rate for automobile drivers in the state of Arizona was 2.1 per 100,000 miles traveled.
As other examples, for 2007, the latest data available, the car driver fatality rate per 100,000 miles traveled was:
- Massachusetts – 0.76
- Rhode Island – 0.80
- Pennsylvania – 1.37
- Louisiana – 2.17
- Mountain – 2.45
Crashes involving large trucks are big news, and while one life lost is a tragedy, safety groups and non-commercial drivers need to look at the real, hard facts when it comes to who really are the safest drivers on the road. .
