driver safety

Traffic Death Numbers Increase, Buttigieg Calls for New Road Safety Strategy

March 3, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

“The rising fatalities on our roadways are a national crisis; we cannot and must not accept these deaths as inevitable,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “People should leave the house and know they’re going to get to their destination safely, and with the resources from the bipartisan infrastructure law, plus the policies in the National Roadway Safety Strategy we launched last month, we will do everything we can to save lives on America’s roads.”

Buttigieg’s comments come after a recently-released federal report’s crash data show 38,824 deaths occurred in traffic incidents throughout 2020, although shelter-at-home orders brought about fewer miles traveled overall. This is the highest number of roadway fatalities since 2007, and an overall 6.8% increase–while car and truck vehicle miles traveled dropped 11%.

The death rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled rose by 21% from 2019–from 1.11 to 1.34, marking the biggest recorded percentage increase.

The Department of Transportation said in a report to Congress that it is focusing on prioritizing the health and safety of drivers in the modern era–that is: public transit users, rideshare and electric scooter users, and those delivering food and goods to households. Funding will be allocated significantly towards safer roadways, traffic roundabouts, bike paths, transit lanes, sidewalks, and pathways to bus stops.

The department, Buttigieg explained, is shifting from states’ previous prioritization of adding additional car lanes for congestion relief, which often reduces the quality of life for surrounding neighborhoods.

The report, which noted that “safety is consistently DOT’s top priority,” said that the adoption of the “Complete Streets” strategy by the Federal Highway Administration will “have a positive impact on the safety of all roadway users–reversing the trend of increasing fatal and serious injuries and creating a healthier, greener, and more equitable surface transportation system.”

The importance of focusing on these safety aspects is due to the report’s finding that around one-third of all American traffic fatalities have been deaths of those outside of motor vehicles, such as pedestrians and motorcyclists.

“A Complete Street is safe, and feels safe, for everyone using the street,” said the deputy head of the highway administration, Stephanie Pollack. “We can’t keep people safe on our roads if we don’t have safer roads and roads that slow down drivers to safe speeds. Through our Complete Streets initiative, FHWA will play a leadership role in providing an equitable and safe transportation network for travelers of all ages and abilities, including vulnerable road users and those from underserved communities that have faced historic disinvestment.”

This focus change will work to help cities that have struggled in funding economically-friendly transit improvements, as well as to slow traffic, reduce roadway deaths, and bring together communities initially separated by redlining tactics of the past. In fact, 2020’s data shows that lower-income, African-American residents more often live near common pedestrian crash areas and busy highways.

“The tragic loss of life of people represented by these numbers confirms that we have a deadly crisis on our nation’s roads,” said Steven Cliff, NHTSA’s Deputy Administrator. “While overall traffic crashes and people injured were down in 2020, fatal crashes and fatalities increased. We cannot allow this to become the status quo.”

For 2021, preliminary estimates for vehicle deaths show more than 46,000 deaths–an increase of 9% from 2020, according to the National Safety Council, which called these numbers “dark and disturbing.”

“Every crash and fatality on the highway is a tragedy,” said vice president of safety policy for American Trucking Associations, Dan Horvath. “So while it is good to see truck-involved crashes [fall], the overall trend in highway fatalities is distressing. We have long believed that driving behaviors like speeding, texting and aggressive driving–behaviors that anecdotally rose during the pandemic–are major contributors to crashes, and this data would support that conclusion. We urge federal regulators to do the important work needed to identify the true causes of crashes–particularly truck-involved crashes–and then work with law enforcement to enact strategies to curb these behaviors in motorists.”

New Headlight Tech Will Avoid Blinding Drivers, Improve Road Safety

March 1, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Highway safety regulators are now moving forward with permitting a new kind of headlight in an effort to avoid the temporary blindness drivers can face when passing a vehicle with strong, high-beam headlights.

These high-tech lights can tailor beams automatically to focus only on dark areas without creating glare that can hurt the eyes of those in oncoming traffic. The final rule has just been published in the Federal Register after being issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which noted that it’s time to permit these “adaptive driving beam headlights.”

“The final rule will improve safety for pedestrians and bicyclists by making them more visible at night, and will help prevent crashes by better illuminating animals and objects in and along the road,” said NHTSA when it announced the rule.

The headlights utilize LED lamps to be able to specifically focus beams on dark regions of the road, especially within the driver’s lane and along the shoulder and roadside. When traffic is oncoming, the lights’ sensors can automatically diminish light beam intensity and focus the lights in specific areas.

“You have the ability to basically create a light pattern on the fly that is optimized for real-time conditions,” said principal mobility analyst for Guidehouse Research, Sam Abuelsamid. “You can cast the light where it’s most useful.”

Abuelsamid explained that the lighting technology uses light-emitting diodes that control in what direction and how strongly the light beams are positioned, and these diodes work much differently than commonly-used lamps that emit high beams all over. Although these new lights are already heavily utilized in Europe, they will take time to spread to mainstream vehicles in the U.S. and will likely be high-cost at first, Abuelsamid added.

Additionally, in vehicles with partially automated driver assist systems, the lighting tech will help this software allow cars to more easily avoid upcoming obstacles, objects in the road, and veering out of the driver’s lane.

Bringing about this new final rule regarding headlights follows a year and a half behind Congress’ bipartisan infrastructure law requirement, and NHTSA noted that its safety measures typically move slowly once Congressional mandates finally come to fruition. Currently, more than a dozen auto safety rules with Congress-passed deadlines are years overdue, as has been the case under the last three presidents presiding over NHTSA’s rule-making actions.

Since 2017, NHTSA has been awaiting an administrator confirmed by the senate, although President Biden has recently nominated Steven Cliff for the role. Cliff is a former air quality regulator for the state of California, and is waiting for full Senate confirmation before beginning his duties with the agency.

The decision to push forth this new rule is likely provoked by a months-long steep increase in overall roadway fatalities throughout the country. In the first nine months of 2021, the number of traffic deaths on American roads skyrocketed, reaching a government-reported number of 31,720 during that time period. These deaths align with the rising numbers of reckless driving behavior the country saw throughout the pandemic era, especially as shelter-in-place orders were issued and roadways cleared, causing many drivers to feel the need to speed excessively.

Between January and September 2021, the estimated number of vehicle crash deaths rose by 12% from the same period in 2020. The number of deaths during this timeframe was the highest within a nine-month span since 2006, and showed the sharpest increase in a nine-month period since 1975–when the Transportation Department first began keeping records of fatal crash data.

“People make mistakes, but human mistakes don’t always have to be lethal,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of these tragic numbers. “In a well-designed system, safety measures make sure that human fallibility does not lead to human fatalities.”

Many safety advocates and transportation industry members are hopeful that this new headlight technology will help many drivers see exactly what they need to while driving at night, and will allow for fewer drivers to become temporarily blinded by high beams and avoid potential crashes caused by this visual difficulty.

Bridge Improvement Funding Needs Expediting for Safety’s Sake, Industry Experts Say

February 28, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Federal funding for bridge-repairing projects is now critical to public safety, according to transportation experts at the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.

Now, these leaders are pushing for the Biden administration and Congress to allocate federal funding to improve these deteriorating bridges, as current funds available to states for bridge projects still fail to include full transportation appropriations outlined within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

This legislation was passed in November 2021, and the most recent spending solution–which made funds available for certain surface transportation projects–ended in mid-February. Under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $27.5 billion was set to be offered to states for bridge repair needs throughout the next five years. However, if spending approval is pushed back, project start dates will be further delayed–perhaps to the detriment of driver safety.

“We urge Congress to act forthwith so that the American people can begin to realize the benefits of the historic investments in the bipartisan infrastructure law,” said president and CEO of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, Dave Bauer.

This funding is indeed historic, and considered nearly unprecedented by many transportation organizations, including the American Society of Civil Engineers. However, it still may not be enough for all the improvements truly needed throughout the country.

As ASCE’s president-elect Maria Lehman put it, the investment is a “major plus-up,” and “a great start, but it’s not the silver bullet.” In fact, the funding should have been released earlier, as “infrastructure is a system of systems,” Lehman continued. ”It’s the weak link that brings everything down.”

Although bridges deemed to be in “fair” condition can just undergo repairs, if a bridge is considered to be in “poor” condition, it needs to be replaced as soon as possible. Currently, 36% of all 224,000 American bridges either need repair or replacement–78,800 of those need full replacement, according to ARTBA’s 2022 Bridge Report, which analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Bridge Inventory database.

The states with the highest number of bridges classified as being in “poor” condition are: Iowa, with 4,504 such bridges; Pennsylvania,with 3,198; Illinois, with 2,405; Oklahoma, with 2,296; Missouri, with 2,218; New York, with 1,672; Louisiana, with 1,631; California, with 1,493; West Virginia, with 1,490; and Ohio, with 1,334.

“Our infrastructure is always there, doing its job,” said Lehman. “It’s not until something goes drastically wrong that people pay attention. Civil engineering failure is front and center because it’s important to people.”

Truckers should also be diligent in paying attention to bridge load postings, as this is a major aspect of overall bridge safety, Lehman added.

“Maybe it won’t collapse [if your truck has a heavier weight than allowed], but you are straining it,” she said.

Various organizational leaders collaborated on a letter sent to congressional lawmakers in February in an effort to persuade them to pass timely appropriations for the 2022 fiscal year, as a method of instilling “confidence in our residents as we navigate through the ongoing pandemic.”

The letter was signed by prominent members of the Council of State Governments, the International City and County Management Association, the National Association of Counties, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Governors Association, the National League of Cities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

“The [Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act] represents a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure, and Congress must ensure that these new resources are made available to state, territory, and local governments as intended under the law,” said the group leaders in their letter.

Additionally, local municipalities, along with state transportation departments, should find ways of boosting their funding availability by utilizing economies of scale. For example, choosing bridge improvement projects within one regional area could bring lower overall administrative costs, Lehman explained.

“It’s really important that we start to think of system solutions instead of one-off solutions,“ she noted.

ATRI Releases Top Truck Bottlenecks List, Chicago Ranks #6

February 26, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

The American Transportation Research nInstitute has released its 2022 list of Top Truck Bottlenecks, with some particular areas continuing to see little improvement.

Traffic across the country has returned to similar levels as before the pandemic due to more people returning to in-person workdays, as well as e-commerce and the overall demand for goods growing exponentially. Throughout 2021, rush hour speed averages for trucks dropped 11%, down to 38.6 miles per hour.

“ATRI’s bottleneck list is a road map for federal and state administrators responsible for prioritizing infrastructure investments throughout the country,” said Chris Spear, President of American Trucking Associations. “Every year, ATRI’s list highlights the dire needs for modernizing and improving our roads and bridges.”

The bottleneck list is compiled by ATRI’s assessment of truck-involved congestion levels at 300 different locations throughout the country’s highways. To collect data, ATRI utilizes truck GPS data and insights from more than a million commercial vehicles.

“The annual study from [ATRI], based [on] real-time GPS data, provides a timeline and actionable blueprint for prioritizing road and bridge funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill,” explained ATA in a tweet.

Chicago’s I-290/I-90/I-94 interchange, named the Jane Byrne Interchange, made sixth place on the list for the second year in a row. By the end of 2022, the city plans to complete the interchange’s $800 million upgrade.

The top worst freight bottleneck in the United States, for the fourth year in a row, was deemed to be the intersection of New Jersey State Route 4 and Interstate 95 in Fort Lee, New Jersey–this bottleneck has ranked near the top of ATRI’s list for more than a decade. Average rush hour speeds in this bottleneck were 22.4 miles per hour, down from 2020 by 28.2%. Average overall speeds were just 30.1 miles per hour.

In second place was the I-71/I-75 intersection in downtown Cincinnati, located along the Ohio River, north of the Brent Spence Bridge. This major bottleneck comes after a late-2020 bridge fire brought a shutdown as engineers rushed to fix such a heavily-utilized area. The major checkpoint brought about by the damage caused transportation officials in Ohio and Kentucky to consider a nearby companion bridge project, which would help ease traffic issues close to the Amazon hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

Following behind is Houston’s I-45/I-69/US-59 intersection, which is two spots higher than its place on 2021’s list. Interstate 45 was likely to undergo reconstruction and rerouting through a $7.5 billion proposal, which was approved by the Texas Department of Transportation in 2021. However, the project will require the demolition of 340 businesses, 1,100 homes and apartments, and five places of worship–so it has understandably been met with heavy opposition from various groups.

Fourth and fifth place were both taken by Atlanta bottlenecks–one at the “Spaghetti Junction” of the I-285/I-85 North interchange in DeKalb County, as well as the I-20/I-285 intersection on the west side of the city. Behind Chicago’s sixth-place ranking was Los Angeles’ California state Route 60 and State Route 57 interchange, dubbed the “Diamond Bar interchange,” and in eighth place was Texas’ I-45/I-30 interchange in Dallas.

I-30 in both directions from downtown Dallas to I-634 in the city’s Mesquite suburb will be modernized and widened through a $1 billion project likely beginning in 2026, according to officials at the Texas Department of Transportation.

In ninth and tenth place were San Bernandino’s I-10/I-15 interchange and Chattanooga’s I-75/I-24 intersection, respectively. Chattanooga’s bottleneck is currently in the midst of a $12.6 million upgrade, the second phase of which is set to begin in mid-2023.

“We have seen, most recently in Pittsburgh, that the cost of doing nothing could also cost lives,” said ATA’s Spear, referring to the 10 people in Pittsburgh who were injured during the collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge in late January. “It’s time to fund these projects and get our supply chains moving again.”

Truck Parking Woes Hinder Driver Recruitment

February 25, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Yesterday, we reported on the difficulties around truck parking availability that have been exacerbated by urban traffic challenges and the recent e-commerce boom. As frustrating as this issue has been for existing truck drivers, the lack of parking poses another problem for the industry: retaining and recruiting truckers during the ongoing truck driver shortage.

“There are people who want to be truck drivers, but sometimes they can’t become drivers because they don’t know where to park,” said Roehl Transportation’s vice president of driver employment, Tim Norlin. As residential truck parking has become more frequently banned in various cities, drivers may be deterred from joining the industry if they have nowhere to park while they’re at home.

This is a major challenge for drivers recruitment efforts, as many fleets have prioritized a focus on offering ample time at home for truckers. These conversations around truck parking availability typically begin early on in the recruitment process, Norlin added.

“More than half of our drivers are home every week,” he said. “If other carriers are doing the same thing, it is compounding that issue. We try to find out what [a driver’s] plan is, and if it is to park in the street in front of their house…it is getting more and more challenging, and it is not just [within] the major metro areas. A lot of smaller cities don’t want trucks in their parking lots.”

This is also doubly difficult on drivers who need especially safe areas to park in, such as female drivers; this problem is making recruiting women into the trucking industry as tricky as ever.

“Women are almost 50% of the workforce in general, but in trucking, they are 6.5-to-8% of drivers,” said Dan Murray, American Transportation Research Institute’s senior vice president. “They have told us time and time again–safety and security is their biggest issue. They need lighting, fences, and restrooms.”

Some mobile apps are coming into play to hopefully make finding available parking easier, such as Trucker Path; the app’s chief marketing officer, Chris Oliver, noted that parking on the East Coast has been more difficult than on the West Coast because of overall population density.

“There are certainly large metropolitan areas in both the East and the West, but the big difference is the space between those large metro areas,” he explained.

Through crowdsourcing information (like sending pop-up questions to ask about available spaces or if a lot is full), Trucker Path is able to offer real-time parking availability information directly to commercial drivers.

“This is made possible via geofences we’ve established around all of the known parking locations,” said Oliver.

In addition, American Trucking Associations, ATRI, and Natso, a truck stop-and travel plaza-representing trade association, have collaborated to create the Truck Parking Leadership Initiative, from which the app, Park My Truck, was born. In the app, rest areas, truck stops, and other locations are able to report the number of spaces available in their lots at any given time.

Everyone involved in the shipping process can help with parking challenges, from customers and receivers to distribution centers and shippers, noted Shawn Brown, Cargo Transporters’ vice president of safety.

“It is so huge that internally, we remind our customer service team of the importance of knowing ahead of time places [in which] we can and cannot park, so the drivers know,” he explained. “That is as important as the rate.”

Often, even if a trucker can park at the location of a shipper or receiver, there are not enough of the amenities a driver may need readily available. Because of this, industry members are urging that all parties honor delivery and pickup times as closely to the given schedule as possible.

“Just because you drive a truck with a sleeper berth, it doesn’t solve your problems for all of life’s basic necessities,” said president of the Minnesota Trucking Association, John Hausladen. “You need access to food, restrooms, and showers. If you’re not on duty, [you need to be] able to interact with others.”

Making known that safe, reliable parking is available will be a major key to boosting recruitment numbers, Brown added.

Drivers “can be more productive with their time away from home, make more money, and have less stress” when safe parking is available, he said. “A happy driver leads to reduced turnover, and [peace of mind] can bring more drivers into the industry.”

On the drivers’ part, trip planning should always include a plan for parking, as well, Roehl’s Norlin added.

“Don’t just drive to an area and hope to park,” he said. “Plan or know from experience where to park. It’s all about [security]. We need a gated, secured location for drivers to park, and it is getting harder and harder for drivers to find.”

Truck Parking Availability Issue Worsens Amid E-Commerce Boom, Lack of Funding

February 24, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

“There isn’t a day that goes by that a parking issue doesn’t come up, whether it is a driver that can’t find a place to park, or a customer won’t let them park,” said vice president of safety for Cargo Transporters, Shawn Brown.

Truck parking has remained a major issue for the entire trucking industry, an issue that has been significantly worsened by the coronavirus-induced boost in nationwide e-commerce. Additionally, a lack of parking funding in city areas, as well as various municipal mandates, have made the problem as severe as ever.

Hopefully, shipper solutions, technology-based methods, and private and public investments will help to ease the issue, some industry experts say.

“It is one of these issues that is going to be right there in our [faces] until we make a truly concerted effort to do something,” said senior vice president of the American Transportation Research Institute, Dan Murray. “There are no short-term solutions to fix it.”

Parking concerns worsen the closer a trucker is to a densely-populated, urban region, noted president of C.R. England, Brandon Harrison, as these areas see the most freight traffic.

“Late afternoon and evening hours continue to be some of the most challenging times for drivers to find parking availability,” he said.

The steep incline in e-commerce is pushing demand towards larger cities, which has exacerbated parking capacity issues–as has land costs and zoning restrictions, said ATRI research associate, Alexandra Shirk. States have continued to end up “on the other side of the fence when it comes to fighting or enhancing the truck parking opportunities,” added Murray.

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s director of enforcement programs, William Elovirta, also chimed in, noting that urban planning development has begun focusing on parking space reduction in recent years.

“I don’t think we’re seeing a huge effort on the local and state [levels] for an organized push for truck parking in the same sense of the other priorities,” he explained.

Many industry members have been lamenting the idea that even though both the public and the government see the need to improve the nation’s bridges and roads, truck parking is often overlooked. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act initially allocated $1 billion toward parking funding, but the funding was ultimately dropped from the measure. Once the legislation officially passed, truck parking funding was not included.

“There is discretionary funding available that can be put toward trucking parking solutions,” added Shirk, who notes that it now seems parking funding is in competition with that of bridge and road projects.

The state of Minnesota expects around a 30% increase in federal funding from the infrastructure bill, and the Minnesota Trucking Association is currently advocating for funds to finally be allocated to truck parking capability, said the association’s president, John Hausladen.

“We’re hopeful that at least there is a pool to work with, but the fact that truck parking was not designated in any of those funds means it continues to battle with every other need,” he explained.

Additionally, cities like Minneapolis have been banning parking in residential streets, which can make matters even worse than they already are, Hasladen added.

“As a highly populated urban center, there isn’t a lot of available land to just create truck parking without some sort of incentives or government support that move it forward,” he said.

The trucking industry has actually begun looking toward private and public parking options alike, noted ATRI’s Murray.

“In a perfect world, we’d have perfect collaboration where the public sector helps the private sector expand capacity and manage capacity,” he noted.

Individual states should also start looking into methods of lowering private sector costs in regards to expanding or building designated truck parking areas–this may include land acquisition, maintenance assistance, or specific tax incentives, according to Tiffany Wlazlowski Neuman, the vice president of public affairs at truck and travel stop industry-representing trade association, Natso.

Natso also recommends that regulators begin actively exploring the potential effects of any new legislation on truck parking, such as the ELD mandate, which brought major changes to when truckers drive and when they park, as well as to the overall utilization of available truck parking.