Tired Trucker Roundtable: If we plan it, they will come. Can we pull it off?

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety, , , , ,

Even though our efforts to improve underride protection are far from being finished, I would like to also tackle the project of organizing a Tired Trucker Roundtable. The only problem is that I have not yet identified any sponsoring organizations or potential facilities for holding such an important event.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Truck Safety Coalition were the co-sponsors with AnnaLeah & Mary for Truck Safety of the Underride Roundtable on May 5, 2016. However, at this time, they are not in a position to participate in a similar fashion with a Tired Trucker Roundtable.

Exactly what am I envisioning with this Tired Trucker Roundtable? Let me try to summarize the highlights:

  1. Over and over, truck crash tragedies occur which seem to involve tired truckers.
  2. Of course, it is harder to measure driver fatigue than DUI — after the fact.
  3. Some of the solutions to this problem have included logging driver hours in paper log books (too often unreliable and, in our crash, never seen by us or our attorney or DA) and more recently rulemaking (currently in a lawsuit) has been issued to require electronic log books.  ScanWashington DC 151Washington DC 156Washington DC 152
  4. These log books are to be connected to the official Hours of Service (HOS) requirements for truck drivers regulated by DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA).
  5. There has, of course, been ongoing debate about what is appropriate for the details of these HOS. A virtual and ongoing political tug-of-war which leaves the truck drivers in a confusing muddle and truck crash victims in the grave.
  6. I have read comments from and had “discussions with” many truck drivers who are convinced that these HOS rules need to have the input of truck drivers who are experienced with what works for them.
  7. Of course, the problem that should probably involve other players than DOT agencies — like the Department of Labor and  the Department of Health & Human Services (CDC/Public Health) — is that it is to a great extent a problem of how truck drivers are normally compensated (by the mile) and their great difficulty in making a living wage without a great toll on their health.
  8. And it must definitely include various sectors of the trucking industry–carriers, shippers, brokers, independent owner-operators.
  9. Government regulators.
  10. Sleep apnea may also be a factor for many.
  11. In general, their occupation involves long hours of monotonous driving which can lead to not just falling asleep but microsleep which can be as bad or worse than driving DUI.
  12. Trucks take longer to brake but are traveling along with the rest of the traffic — posing a hazard to us all, especially when you add in the factor of the geometric mismatch (not merely a weight difference) of the height of the crush zone of the front of passenger vehicles vs the height of the lower edge of trucks. Underride protection (even what is currently legislated) is too weak and ineffective.
  13. And really, driver fatigue is not just a trucker problem — now is it?
  14. Fatigue, of course, is not the only problem; distracted behavior needs to be discussed as well, and other factors of what might make a truck driver inattentive and not ready to react in a timely manner to avoid tragedies.
  15. Let’s not forget the road system and things like electronic signs to alert drivers of upcoming traffic back-ups or law enforcement actions to divert traffic or teaching drivers how to respond, etc.
  16. And, of course, safety technology — to alert drivers when they are in microsleep or crash avoidance systems (but still, then the driver has to react to the surrounding circumstances) and DON’T FORGET underride protection, parking for truck drivers who do need to take breaks but so they don’t create hazards in their parking location, conspicuity, side mirrors.
  17. Lack of truck parking options causes a big problem.
  18. I’m sure that I have forgotten something; but I hope that you get the idea!

Now all I need is for some others (in addition to truck drivers) to catch the vision and help me out with planning this thing — finding sponsors, a facility, speakers, resources, etc.

Let’s collaborate together. Let’s make it happen. Let’s be amazed at the results.

Tired Trucker Roundtable

The latest reason to do so: Semi driver was inattentive, distracted when he hit family’s minivan in I-80 crash, State Patrol says

AnnaLeah & Mary are “safe” in His hands. Still, I do what I can to reduce preventable needless deaths.

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety,
17 years ago, I was great with child: Mary Lydia Karth. Her due date had come and gone and I was more than ready to meet her & hold her.
 
Little did I know that 17 years later — instead of getting ready to celebrate her birthday — I would be relentlessly working to keep others from facing the same kind of truck crash tragedy which took Mary (13) and her older sister AnnaLeah (17) on May 4, 2013.
 
Photos: Very pregnant with Mary,  Newborn Mary at the hospital, Mary meets her 8 older siblings at the hospital, AnnaLeah holding newborn Mary, Mary at 9 holding her newborn niece, May 4, 2013/The End of Their Earthly Journey, the girls’ headstone
1a Mom with Caleb waiting for Mary to be born 0011b newborn Mary1bb at the hospital to see Mary1i newborn Mary and AnnaLeah (1)1m newborn Mary and Mama10 IMG_1111IMG_4464IMG_20140508_114515_341
In Christ Alone
(last verse)

No guilt in life, no fear in death,
This is the power of Christ in me;
From life’s first cry to final breath,
Jesus commands my destiny.
No power of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand:
Till He returns or calls me home,
Here in the power of Christ I’ll stand.

Stuart Townend & Keith Getty, Copyright © 2001 Thankyou Music

I know that AnnaLeah and Mary are “safe” in His hands forever. But that does not stop me from working where I can to reduce preventable needless deaths.
Care2 Petition (August 2, 2016): End Preventable Crash Fatalities: Appoint a National Traffic Safety Ombudsman

Why is it that we can’t seem to stem the tide of senseless vehicle violence?

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety

Two more terrible truck crashes. I hear it over and over: traffic back up; truck doesn’t stop in time. People die.

By following a facebook group Work Zone & Truck Safety, I have learned about the countless deaths which occur in those areas. Can we and should we do better at protecting workers & travelers on our roads?

See this NHTSA Report on TRAFFIC SAFETY FACTS 2014. Go to page 112 for stats on 2014 fatalities in Work Zones.  It shows that there were 669 fatalities of which 260 were in the largest subcategory.

I have mentioned many times that our crash was not an accident and that many factors contribute to crashes and traffic fatalities — including drowsy & distracted truck drivers who are driving death machines — which is why I proposed a Tired Trucker Roundtable.

Don’t you think that we really need to do something about these senseless, preventable tragedies? I have proposed that the President and Congress work together to appoint a National Traffic Safety Ombudsman.

I just launched a new petition asking them to do so: End Preventable Crash Fatalities: Appoint a National Traffic Safety Ombudsman

Please sign this now to send a life-saving message loud & clear:  http://tinyurl.com/hep29wg

Ombudsman for Traffic Safety

 

New Care2 Petition to End Preventable Crash Deaths: Appoint a Traffic Safety Ombudsman

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety,

After one more awful truck crash tragedy last weekend, I decided to launch a new petition on Care2 where we had our previous petitions.

This happened on Sunday in Nebraska: Young family killed in I-80 crash was headed to Colorado for missionary training

Oh, and here is another deadly truck underride crash which just happened yesterday in Michigan! Car lodged under semi trailer in crash; 1 dead

Please sign, share & promote this needed action. Stand up with us & help us work to bring about effective strategies to address this problem which touches us all.

End Preventable Crash Fatalities: Appoint a National Traffic Safety Ombudsman

Care2 Petition: http://tinyurl.com/hep29wg

Tragic deaths17hou5

 

After another truck crash tragedy, I launched a new petition for a Traffic Safety Advocate. Sign here.

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety

Appoint a National Traffic Safety Ombudsman To End Preventable Crash Fatalities

Petition Created by M.K. on August 02, 2016

We propose that the President establish an independent Office of National Traffic Safety Ombudsman to be an advocate to eliminate preventable crash deaths and serious injuries.

Every average day in the U.S., 100 of our loved ones die in crash deaths and 400 more suffer serious crash injuries–along with $2 Billion in crash losses.

We need someone who has a mandate to advocate on behalf of the victims, someone who is not compromised by competing interests. We call on the President to take this action to protect our families and loved ones from one of the leading causes of preventable death.

Traffic Safety has not been a national priority. Without this Presidential action, too many lives will continue to be lost to vehicle violence.

Sign & Share: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/384/321/600/end-preventable-crash-fatalities-appoint-a-national-traffic-safety-ombudsman/

(Note, as of August 2, The petition on the White House site is now expired; sign the above one at Care2 instead! https://wh.gov/iFPSv)

ONE MORE TRUCK CRASH TRAGEDY too many: Young family killed in I-80 crash was headed to Colorado for missionary training

Anger & frustration in aftermath of truck crash tragedies: https://annaleahmary.com/2016/06/the-anger-and-frustration-in-the-aftermath-of-a-truck-crash-are-not-easily-resolved/

Vehicle violence

For more info: https://annaleahmary.com/tag/traffic-safety-ombudsman/

One more terrible truck crash tragedy. When will we set traffic safety as a national goal?

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety

My petition on the White House website asking President Obama to appoint a Traffic Safety Ombudsman did not get the necessary 100,000 signatures within 30 days. It was archived yesterday.

So now the White House will not have to tell me why they will not do this thing — appoint a Traffic Safety Ombudsman — which could help to end senseless road tragedies.

Traffic Safety Ombudsman Petition calls for a Visible, Vigilant Voice for Vulnerable Road Users (Us)

After posting today on facebook about another terrible truck crash tragedy, this website is getting a lot of views. I wish this were behind us and I didn’t have reason to keep writing and fighting for safer roads. But here I am reminding myself that, yes, a Traffic Safety Ombudsman would be a good thing.

But who will listen? What should I do next? Who will work with me?

Next 4 yearsTragic deaths

I have not heard one word from Washington, D.C., about our 20,000 Vision Zero Petition signatures. That’s a problem. Either they think they are already doing what that Petition requests (with which I would disagree) OR they don’t think that it is important enough to do anything about. That is something which we should all rise up about.

In fact, how I envision it is that the Traffic Safety Ombudsman would be the person to implement the requests of the Vision Zero Petition. Small businesses have a National Ombudsman. Why not do the same for the victims of tragic, preventable traffic crashes?

What are we waiting for?! This would be the perfect complement to our Vision Zero Petition requests for a National Vision Zero Goal, a White House Vision Zero Task Force, and a Vision Zero Executive Order. In fact, the Traffic Safety Ombuds(man) (Advocate) would fit in extremely well with this plan and, now that I think about it, is actually probably the missing piece of the puzzle for making Vision Zero a viable goal:

  1. The Traffic Safety Ombuds would develop, refine, and monitor the pursuit of a National Vision Zero Goal.
  2. The Traffic Safety Ombuds would oversee the White House Vision Zero Task Force.
  3. The Traffic Safety Ombuds would be the watchdog to make sure that the Vision Zero Executive Order and Vision Zero rulemaking were carried out appropriately on behalf of travelers on the road.

Makes sense to me. Because, really, who would be given the responsibility and authority to oversee these things otherwise?!

“Responsibility in Engineering: Toward a New Role for Engineering Ethicists”

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety, ,

Responsibility in Engineering: Toward a New Role for Engineering Ethicists

Traditionally, the management of technology has focused on the stages before or after development of technology. In this approach the technology itself is conceived as the result of a deterministic enterprise; a result that is to be either rejected or embraced. However, recent insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown that there is ample room to modulate technology during development. This requires technology managers and engineering ethicists to become more involved in the technological research rather than assessing it from an outsider perspective. Instead of focusing on the question whether or not to authorize, approve, or adopt a certain technology or on the question of who is to blame for potential mistakes, the guiding question in this new approach is how research is to be carried out.

Responsibility in Engineering: Toward a New Role for Engineering Ethicists by Neelke Doorn, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, n.doorn{at}tudelft.nl
and Jessica Nihlén Fahlquist, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

doi: 10.1177/0270467610372112
Bulletin of Science Technology Society June 2010 vol. 30 no. 3 222-230

Negotiated Rulemaking

Is it ethical to not use safety technology which could save human lives?

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety, , ,

I still can’t believe that they are gone and won’t ever come back.

The circumstances that led to their deaths, and the way that fighting for safer roads has taken over my life, make it all seem so unreal.

Oh, sure, there are big chunks of normal everyday life. But overall, there is a sense that something is very wrong with this world and how can I ever go back to thinking otherwise?

I wrote those words last night in an effort to grapple with the aching grief.

As I reflect more upon that dilemma, I think that it stems from a kind of raging helplessness, an inability to change that which callously tosses aside the value of human life and is able to do so because there is always someone else at whom to point the finger of blame or to expect to shoulder the responsibility to do something about the problem.

So the end result, for the embittered mourner, may be that there is no easily-identified enemy to fight. Victory is elusive. Intangible. Slippery. If a battle is won, too often loopholes appear or the victory has come only through compromise.

And why should that be? Why don’t we place a higher value on saving human life from preventable, senseless deaths? Is compromise the only option?

Is it because of a lurking attitude of c’est la vie, que sera sera — that’s life, whatever will be , will be?

Until it touches your life. Then you’ll understand. Then it will be too late.

Car Safety Wars

Writing this because I miss them. . .

Note: After writing the above, I looked to see what I could find online regarding the ethics of saving human lives related to road safety. [My search terms were: Is it ethical to not use safety technology to save human lives?] I found an interesting essay on the topic, Saving lives in road traffic—ethical aspects, and am pasting the concluding remarks from that article here:

I would like to end this overview of ethical problem areas in traffic safety with some concluding thoughts on how these five ethical topics can be included and inform policy.

Criminalisation

Attempts should be made to analyse the problem at hand carefully and as open-mindedly as possible before rushing to the conclusion that the best way to reduce or eliminate an unwanted and harmful behaviour is to criminalise and punish. Alternatives should be considered and creativity in problem solving encouraged. A good example is drunk driving where the alcohol interlock is a device worth considering as an alternative or at least additional measure to punishment.

Paternalism

Most measures to increase safety in road traffic can be motivated by the notion of protecting others against harm, which means that even a liberal can endorse them. However, there are some measures where the most beneficial to society may be to ignore it, for example motorcyclists not wearing a helmet, but where most people still believe society should protect individuals against harm by legislation or technology. It should be acknowledged that this is the case, and it would be helpful to carefully analyse and discuss new measures, keeping in mind the distinction between harming others and harming oneself. In some cases, most people share an intuition that a measure is justifiable even though it is paternalistic, but in other cases paternalistic measures appear unjustifiable. By acknowledging and discussing such issues freely and publicly we make sure that new laws and technologies are at least closer to being ethically justifiable.

Privacy

There appears to be a fundamental difference between privacy in our own homes and privacy on the road. The reasons we are equally attached to the notion of privacy in our cars as we are to privacy in our homes are tradition, culture and habits. We should recognise that the great degree of risk-exposure associated with driving may imply that the expectation of privacy on the road is not reasonable.

Justice

A humane society protects vulnerable human beings. A humane infrastructure protects vulnerable road users, for example children, the elderly and disabled people. This implies that we should not count their lives or the quality of their lives less than others. It may even mean that additional attention should be directed at protecting such groups. A minimal requirement should be that potential damaging effects on vulnerable groups should always be taken into account when planning infrastructural projects.

Responsibility

The traditional view of responsibility for traffic safety is closely attached to the notion that safety is about individuals driving safely and that accidents are caused by drivers. While this is true to some extent, the emerging view that a major role can and should be played by institutions, for example governments and vehicle-producing companies, is useful and reasonable. The implied notion is that responsibility has to be distributed and shared between different actors if a safer road traffic environment is to be achieved.

People in industrialised societies are so used to road traffic that it is almost considered a part of nature. Consequently, we do not acknowledge that we can introduce change and that we can affect the role we have given road traffic and cars. By acknowledging the ethical aspects of road traffic and illuminating the way the choices society makes are ethically charged, it becomes clear that there are alternative ways to design the road traffic system. The most important general conclusion is that discussion concerning these alternative ways of designing the system should be encouraged. Here are some examples of questions to address in public debates:

  • What are the reasons for prohibiting certain behaviour or requiring a certain safety device—to protect the individual from herself, to protect others or to save money? Which of these reasons are valid?
  • Should society criminalise unsafe behaviour or use technology (when possible) to eliminate the unwanted behaviour?
  • To what extent is it reasonable to expect privacy on the road?
  • Should additional measures be used to protect vulnerable road users?
  • Should safety be seen as the result of individuals behaving responsibly or the system designers designing safe systems?

Saving lives in road traffic—ethical aspects

Jessica Nihlén Fahlquistcorresponding author1,2
1Department of Philosophy, Delft University of Technology, P.O. Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
2Division of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology, Teknikringen 78B, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
Jessica Nihlén Fahlquist, Phone: +46-739-853215, ln.tfledut@tsiuqlhaf-nelhin.a.j.

How many crash deaths will there be in the next 100 days & next 4 years? 10,000/140,000?

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety, ,
Every day that goes by, someone in our country is impacted by Vehicle Violence. So in the next 100 days, as we approach the 2016 Election Day in November, what kind of crash statistics might we expect?

According to Lou Lombardo, we can estimate what we have to look forward to in the next 100 days, as well as the next 4 years:

Next 100 Days


Over the next 100 days Vehicle Violence, in the U.S.A. alone, will result in:

~10,000 Deaths.  Current rate about 100 deaths per day.

~ 40,000 Serious Injuries. Serious injuries include Brain (TBIs, Spinal Cord (quadriplegia and paraplegia), amputations and burns at a current rate of about 400 per day.

~ $200 Billion in losses. Current rate about $2 Billion in losses per day.

Next 4 Years

Over the next 4 years Vehicle Violence, in the U.S.A. alone, can be expected at current rates to result in:

~ 140,000 Deaths.  Current rate is about 35,000 Deaths per year.

~  560,000 Serious Injuries.  Current rate is about 140,000 serious injuries per year.

~  $3 Trillion in losses.  Current rate is about $836 Billion per year using 2010 NHTSA estimates.

“When quality of life valuations are considered, the total value of societal harm from motor vehicle crashes in 2010 was $836billion.”

 

Source: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812240

Lou

____________________
Lou Lombardo
www.CareForCrashVictims.com
We should ask ourselves, will our next President do anything to change that outlook?
Next 4 years

One truck driver is concerned that developing automated safety systems for trucks is more difficult.

Safety Advocacy, Truck Safety

If you are hoping that automated safety technology for trucks could make a big difference, be sure and read the opinion of one truck driver, who is concerned that developing automated safety systems for trucks is more difficult.

While these electronic systems have lightning-fast reactions, they don’t have the nuanced judgment of an experienced over-the-road trucker — someone who over many miles has likely encountered every type of road hazard. . .

I am all for anything that will save me time and fuel, and prevent a crash. I really like how when it works, the system tells me the speed and distance of the vehicle in front. That’s really handy when you drive a truck governed at 65 mph. It helps me figure out when to pass in the left lane without affecting traffic flow. The fact that it slows you down gradually to keep you at a safe following distance also is beneficial.

But I worry that turning over control of an 80,000-pound highway missile to sensors and software requires more research and thought. My experience is that these systems are not ready for our highways. Those who want to rush them onto the road in the name of safety better make sure they work.

Let’s do this right. Let’s examine traffic safety from every angle. Let’s work together toward a common goal: saving lives.

Both And