We know from experience and reading studies that truck underride is vastly undercounted. But how important is it to know precisely how many people are impacted by this before taking decisive action to end these preventable tragedies?
Because of the requirement to do cost/benefit analysis when doing federal rulemaking, some people refuse to budge until they get more information than we have already provided. Isn’t the spilled blood we are already aware of enough? Especially coupled with the convincing crash testing which proves that the outcome of collisions could be completely changed!
Here’s another study on estimating side underride fatalities: Estimating Side Underride Fatalities Using Field Data. I was a little hesitant to post it but asked the opinion of Matt Brumbelow, Senior Research Engineer at the IIHS. He says,
While I do have a few concerns with the methodology, the results actually support the conclusion that side underride guards would be greatly beneficial. Specifically, she found that FARS underestimates the occurrence of side underride: over half (52%) of the cases coded as “no underride” actually did have side underride. When you include the crashes that are coded as underride in FARS, they find that 61% of all side impact crashes with a tractor-trailer resulted in underride with PCI. In other words, around 180 fatalities per year (61% of 300) could potentially be prevented with sufficient side underride protection.
While this 61% figure is still smaller than estimates we’ve made, I don’t see how it could lead anyone to think that the benefit of side guards would be small.
For goodness sake, what are we waiting for?!
