On September 1, 2026, NHTSA published in the Federal Register a Request for Correction of Information under the Information Quality Act “Side Impact Guards for Combination Truck Trailers: Cost-Benefit Analysis”Docket No. NHTSA-2023-0012; RIN 2127-AM54, submitted to NHTSA by Eric Hein on August 29, 2026.
This letter, which CC’ed Mava Lewis, Office of the General Counsel at the USDOT, and Jonathan Morrison, the NHTSA Administrator, was accompanied by two documents:
I know that it took me awhile to get through Eric’s 20+ pages; he was very thorough. So I took some time to create a chart to give you a relatively quick overview of the flaws which he found in NHTSA’s 2023 Side Impact Guard Cost Benefit Analysis and the Requests for Correction which he is reasonably asking for. After all, the risk of Death By Underride is ongoing.
The Department of Transportation published a report in May 2020, A Literature Review of Lateral Protection Devices on Trucks Intended for Reducing Pedestrian and Cyclist Fatalities. The published report purported to fulfill a $200,000 contract (number SA9PA1) awarded by the Federal Motor Carrier Administration (FMCSA) to the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center. In 2019, Volpe Center researchers turned in a draft of that report, entitled, “Truck Side Guards and Skirts to Reduce Vulnerable Road User Fatalities: Final Report on Net Benefits and Recommendations” (DOT-VNTSC-FMCSA-19-01). The published literature review left out many of the original objectives outlined in the contract between FMCSA and the Volpe Center to study the effectiveness of truck side guards to reduce Vulnerable Road User deaths.
ALMFTS investigated by requesting documents pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. Internal agency emails reveal that the Department — not the study’s authors — rewrote the Volpe Center Report, in violation of a federal guidance on conducting peer review. The emails document that a NHTSA official made revisions to the original report rather than making recommendations to the study’s authors — as would be done in a genuine peer review.
Here is a subset of those emails — a list of some of the more relevant and revealing ones, which document that revisionism rather than review of a research study took place:
This is a violation of an Office of Management & Budget guidance on peer review — at the peril of Vulnerable Road Users who are at risk of known, unreasonable, and preventable truck underride injuries and death, as well as occupants of passenger vehicles.
When one errs, the right thing to do is to correct the error. The right thing to do here is to correct the information the Department erroneously published. What will the Secretary of Transportation do, at this juncture in history, to protect these souls entrusted to his care?
If only the federal traffic safety agency had fought as hard to get side underride protection on the roads as they did to keep them off the roads, those roads would be a whole lot safer. Although it is only one piece of a larger puzzle, the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center report on truck side guards — before Department officials suppressed its findings — illustrates the cost effectiveness of a technically-proven road safety countermeasure.
