This week, I discovered a U.S. News & World Report article, published on October 2, 2000, entitled, “A Safety Rule, A Fatal Flaw.” I find it enlightening that the trailer manufacturers conceded twenty-two years ago, “underride guards can save lives.” They further admitted that if they had some guidance on technical specifications from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), then they could add side guards to trailers. But the manufacturers were unwilling to spend money doing so unless they were required to install them.
How many lives could have been saved if the U.S. Department of Transportation had acted decisively at that time and initiated side guard rulemaking? Perhaps more to the point, I’d like to know if Secretary Buttigieg will act boldly now to end these senseless, preventable deaths by determining that a side guard regulation is warranted?
The American people, whether they know it or not, have already waited too long for DOT to take decisive action to stop underride tragedies. That’s why it’s encouraging to see Congress putting DOT on notice to move forward with the Underride Mandate. Yesterday, they sent a letter to Secretary Buttigieg:
Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-09) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand led 25 of their colleagues in a letter urging Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Pete Buttigieg to swiftly execute the provisions from their Stop Underrides Act, which passed in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.press release
The letter encourages DOT to act swiftly to release the Final Rear Underride Guard rule with IIHS TOUGHGuard strength and issue an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) in order to allow the Public to comment on side guards, as well as urging them to, “expeditiously establish the Advisory Committee on Underride Protection and to complete the life-saving side guard research which we hope will lead to a proposed rule on side guards. Together these provisions will help save lives and aim to prevent passenger compartment intrusion from crashes with trucks.”
Senator Gillibrand summarized it well, “Every day we don’t act, we are losing an opportunity to save the lives of innocent Americans.”
If you had to guess how many people have died from truck underride, or more specifically from side underride, since DOT talked about side guards on March 19, 1969, what would you say? Well, nobody can say for sure, but I did some Back of the Envelope Math today — using the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) undercounted underride death data.
Why would we equip some trucks to prevent rear underride but not side or front? And why not equip ALL large trucks with available underride prevention technology?
It might not be exact, but it certainly is revealing.
Fifty-three years ago, the Department of Transportation published their intention to add underride protection to the sides of large vehicles after the completion of technical studies. That was on March 19, 1969. In less than a week, 19,358 days will have passed. Surely there’s been enough time to complete research on this long-overdue rulemaking.
So I’m thinking that it isn’t unreasonable to expect NHTSA to make the Underride Initiative a high priority — especially since President Biden signed a bill on November 15, 2021, which included a requirement for the Secretary of Transportation to complete side guard research within a year and then to make a determination as to whether a side guard regulation is warranted.
It might even be a good idea for NHTSA to issue a Request for Comments (RFC) right away — to give the Public a chance to comment on the costs and benefits of adding side underride protection to large trucks. Shouldn’t Secretary Buttigieg want access to as much information as possible when he makes his decision by November 15, 2022? It is, after all, a matter of life & death.
“In both tests, a midsize car struck the center of a 53-foot-long dry van trailer. In the AngelWing test, the underride guard bent but didn’t allow the car to go underneath the trailer, so the car’s airbags and safety belt could properly restrain the test dummy in the driver seat. In the test with no underride guard for protection, the car ran into the trailer and kept going. The impact sheared off part of the roof, and the sedan became wedged beneath the trailer. In a real-world crash like this, any occupants in the car would likely sustain fatal injuries.“March 2017 IIHS Side Crash Tests at 35 mph; 8/29/17 40 mph crash test
I’m grateful that the U.S. Department of Transportation announced their National Roadway Safety Strategy (NRSS) on January 27, 2022. Like others, I’ve waited a long time to hear that news.
“We cannot tolerate the continuing crisis of roadway deaths in America. These deaths are preventable, and that’s why we’re launching the National Roadway Safety Strategy today – a bold, comprehensive plan, with significant new funding from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “We will work with every level of government and industry to deliver results, because every driver, passenger, and pedestrian should be certain that they’re going to arrive at their destination safely, every time.” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg Announces Comprehensive National Roadway Safety Strategy, January 27, 2022
While U.S. DOT has many tools at its disposal and will shoulder our responsibility, this must be a coordinated effort with our stakeholders across the public sector, private sector, advocacy, and research communities. National Roadway Safety Strategy, USDOT, January 2022
On the other hand, I heard strikingly similar rhetoric when Secretary Foxx spoke about the Toward Zero Deaths initiative in March 2015, as well as when NHTSA launched the Road to Zero Coalition in partnership with the National Safety Council on October 5, 2016 (more than a year after we launched our Vision Zero Petition). Here are some relevant quotes:
“We embrace the vision of Toward Zero Deaths; it provides an overarching and common vision that drives and focuses our efforts to achieve our shared goal to eliminate injuries and fatalities on our roadways,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “The U.S. Department of Transportation will do our part by aggressively using all tools at our disposal – research into new safety systems and technologies, campaigns to educate the public, investments in infrastructure and collaboration with all of our government partners to support strong laws and data-driven approaches to improve safety.” AASHTO introduces Toward Zero Deaths Plan to reduce roadway fatalities, 3/10/2015
Deja vu. And what has changed? In any case, here we are. So let’s talk about how the NRSS could be applied to a specific traffic safety issue — truck underride. One Safe System principle included in the NRSS is Redundancy:
Redundancy is Crucial. Reducing risks requires that all parts of the transportation system be strengthened, so that if one part fails, the other parts still protect people.
The Safe System Approach emphasizes that redundancy is critical, and safer roadways mean incorporating design elements that offer layers of protection to prevent crashes from occurring and mitigate harm when they do occur.
This sounds exactly like the combination of crash avoidance technologies (along with improving driver behavior) to prevent crashes from happening, plus underride protection to reduce injuries when crashes do occur. In fact, I’ve previously written about that very topic:
The reality is that crash avoidance technologies cannot prevent all crashes. Even though crash avoidance technologies may be able to reduce speed at impact, they doesn’t necessarily prevent a collision from happening in every instance. In fact, when collisions do occur between a passenger vehicle and a large truck — even at 15 mph — they will likely result in deadly underride and Passenger Compartment Intrusion unless effective underride protection has been installed on the truck.
The NRSS uses the word zero 16 times, including here:
Zero is the only acceptable number of deaths on our highways, roads, and streets. The United States Department of Transportation is committed to taking substantial, comprehensive action to significantly reduce serious and fatal injuries on the Nation’s roadways.
U.S. DOT recognizes the Safe System Approach as encompassing all the roadway safety interventions required to achieve the goal of zero fatalities, including safety programs focused on infrastructure, human behavior, responsible oversight of the vehicle and transportation industry, and emergency response.
Therefore, I will expectantly draw the conclusion that the redundancy principle and the goal of zero fatalities will spur the US DOT to carry out their responsibility to oversee the transportation industry and thereby issue comprehensive underride protection rulemaking — front, side, & rear, on both tractor-trailers and Single Unit Trucks. To do otherwise is hypocrisy.
Will it be necessary for me to continue to ask the question: Is every death unacceptable? Were my daughters’ lives considered worth saving — along with countless other victims of Death By Underride? Is #ZeroTrafficDeaths meaningless rhetoric? Or, is it possible that I can count on the Department of Transportation to prioritize the saving of lives by issuing comprehensive underride rulemaking in which cost benefit analysis is no longer weighted in favor of industry?
Likewise, can I expect when NHTSA is informed of potential safety defects that they will proceed with formal investigations — no matter how many deaths and serious injuries have been reported?
In 2020, I became aware of further proof that underride regulatory analysis was both flawed and non-transparent. For some reason, in 2017, the FMCSA contracted with the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center to carry out a Study of Truck Side Guards to Reduce Pedestrian Fatalities. Originally the study goals were listed on the website like this:
Five key tasks are included in this project: (1) study interaction of a potential side guard with other truck parts and accessories (e.g., fuel tanks, fire extinguisher, exhaust system) and the implications for a new Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulation; (2) investigate applicable international side guard standards; (3) perform a preliminary cost-benefit analysis of truck side guard deployment; (4) propose recommendations; and (5) propose means for voluntary adoption.“
When I found out that there were no plans to publish the completed study results, I made multiple inquiries at DOT and Congress. Some months later, after Departmental multimodal review, the results were whittled down to a literature review and finally published here:
When I realized that the majority of the report was missing, I submitted a FOIA Request asking for a copy of the entire report but was denied due to Exemption 5:
Exemption 5 protects the integrity of the deliberative or policy-making processes within the agency by exempting from mandatory disclosure opinion, conclusions, and recommendations included within inter-agency or intra-agency memoranda or letters. Exemption 5 also exempts from disclosure draft documents and recommendations or other documents that reflect the personal opinion of the author rather than official agency position. Finally, Exemption 5 exempts from disclosure deliberative records that may cause public confusion where the information were not the basis for an agency’s action or final report .
Any reasonable person could look at the conclusions from the published study and compare the data to the literature referenced and realize that there were problems. Here’s a fact sheet outlining the apparent flaws in the report published by FMCSA in May 2020:
A flawed conclusion and inconsistent crash analysis cut the apparent Vulnerable Road User safety benefit of side guards by approximately half.
This is bad. This is wrong. In the first place, the error leads to a flawed cost benefit analysis for underride rulemaking. In the second place, even the undercounted underride deaths for Vulnerable Road Users (pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists) – to the best of my knowledge – have not been included with data on underride deaths in prior NHTSA underride regulatory analysis. Really flawed cost benefit analysis.
Logic says that a flawed cost benefit analysis will lead to a faulty conclusion. The conclusion from multiple underride rulemaking efforts in the past has been that a regulation is not cost effective. In other words, those lives which could have been saved by underride regulations were not deemed worth the cost.
And, by the way, what exactly was the rationale behind leaving out information from the original study? What was DOT concerned about revealing? Would it have actually justified a side guard regulation, which would, of course, have not been looked on very favorably by many in the trucking industry? Would the study have provided a broader look at additional advantages of side guards, including their ability to increase aerodynamic fuel savings, spray reduction, wind stability, GHG reduction, or other accompanying side guard benefits?
As far as I can tell, NHTSA’s faulty analysis has resulted in “guidance” to the industry which effectively turned a blind eye to the fact that trucks with a dangerous design indisputably allow cars and Vulnerable Road Users to go under trucks and sentence thousands of road users to Death By Underride.
To compound the problem, at least in recent years, underride rulemaking has been assigned to the Crashworthiness Standards division of NHTSA in the USDOT. In my opinion, that is not a good fit. The majority of rulemaking done by NHTSA has to do with the auto industry, whereas FMCSA is the agency charged with motor carrier safety.
Furthermore, underride protection doesn’t fit the definition of crashworthiness, namely, “the ability of a car or other vehicle to withstand a collision or crash with minimal bodily injury to its occupants.“ Underride protection is installed on trucks but does not protect truck occupants. So the trucking industry gets away with claiming they’re not responsible to take care of the problem. And it isn’t a feature of the car whose occupants need to be protected, so the automakers don’t have any responsibility. Consequently, underride protection doesn’t truly fit into the current NHTSA division of responsibilities as far as I can tell. The result: on top of industry opposition, underride rulemaking seems doomed because, organizationally, it falls between the cracks.
It appears to me that this complex issue would be better suited as a multimodal collaborative project under the coordination of the Office of the Secretary rather than buried at NHTSA without suitable input from other agencies and the yet-to-be-established Advisory Committee On Underride Protection. Maybe then the Underride Initiative would get the priority status it requires and All Road Users would finally be protected from Death By Underride.
Oh, look, DOT just published their priority Innovation Principles, including this one:
The Department should identify opportunities for interoperability among innovations and foster cross-modal integration. In addition, DOT’s posture must remain nimble, with a commitment to support technologies that further our policy goals.
Will the U.S. DOT let the flawed analysis stand? Or will the coming year see significant progress in underride rulemaking? Secretary Pete, the final determination will be in your hands. Will you decide that comprehensive underride protection is warranted?
As a mom of nine, I know all too well the hardships and difficulties that accompany pregnancy, labor, and birth. So I really shouldn’t be surprised that the process of bringing about change in traffic safety regulations is similarly fraught with angst. Right?
Yet, I was still taken by surprise when I discovered last week that a long-awaited infrastructure bill contained an unexpected revision of legislative language on underride provisions — after it was already passed. Here I thought that the 2021 Infrastructure Bill — even though it didn’t contain a strong mandate for side underride regulations — contained a definite mandate to meet the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) TOUGHGuard level of strength for rear underride protection. Wrong.
Unbeknownst to me, the Senate had revised the House version of that underride requirement — despite the fact that IIHS had clearly shown that engineers could develop rear underride guards to prevent cars from going under the rear of trailers at the outer edges. This revision was noted by IIHS as an apparent and unfortunate rejection of proven safety technology.
Another longstanding IIHS-HLDI priority included in the legislation is improvements to truck underride guards. The bill calls for an updated rear underride standard that would incorporate at least two of the three requirements for the IIHS TOUGHGUARD award: Guards would have to prevent underride by a passenger vehicle traveling 35 mph when it strikes the rear of a trailer in the center or with a 50 percent overlap. It also calls for regulators to consider requiring the most challenging part of the IIHS evaluation, the 30 percent overlap crash.Years of work by IIHS-HLDI paved way for safety provisions in infrastructure bill
In other words, the bill stopped short of a clear mandate to NHTSA to write a rule which would require manufacturers to meet that third requirement. In contrast, the House version of the Infrastructure called for a regulation in which Rear Impact Guards would be required:
“to be equipped with rear impact guards that are designed to prevent passenger compartment intrusion from a trailer or semitrailer when a passenger vehicle traveling at 35 miles per hour makes— (i) an impact in which the passenger vehicle impacts the center of the rear of the trailer or semitrailer; (ii) an impact in which 50 percent the width of the passenger vehicle overlaps the rear of the trailer or semitrailer; and (iii) an impact in which 30 percent of the width of the passenger vehicle overlaps the rear of the trailer or semitrailer. “
Why would they water down the underride provisions so significantly — leaving it to the discretion of the Secretary (under pressure from a resistant Industry) on whether to require a proven solution? Do we want people to die?
These crash test videos show a 30% overlap with & without a TOUGHGuard rear underride guard.
Like any mother facing childbirth, after almost nine years of advocating for change in a dangerous truck design which killed my daughters, I now await the release of the Final Rule [anticipated in January 2022]. Can I expect the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to make a recommendation to the Secretary for the strongest possible level of rear underride protection? Can I trust them to take into full consideration the years of research, along with the unimaginable toll on individuals and families? Will we see a healthy, robust regulation released for rear underride protection?
The American Association for Justice (AAJ) supports our petition to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to recall semitrailers due to lack of side underride guards. We received a letter of support from AAJ on October 25, 2021:
Of particular significance is this statement in the AAJ letter to Secretary Buttigieg:
Van-type and box semitrailers vehicles that do not have underride guards are defective in design, under the statutory definition of defect, because they are missing the critical safety feature of the side underride guard. NHTSA is well within its authority to issue a recall on this critical design defect, that clearly poses an unreasonable risk to highway safety.
Meanwhile, we have been assured by the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation that they are taking this petition into serious consideration. And now we wait to find out exactly what that will mean.
Here is our letter to Secretary Buttigieg on September 14, 2021, which accompanied our petition for a safety recall due to the lack of side underride guards:
Dear Secretary Buttigieg:
In accordance with 49 U.S.C. 30162 and 49 C.F.R § 552.1, please find our petition to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to promptly initiate a safety defect investigation into van-type or box semitrailers because of a known safety hazard and defect from collisions with passenger vehicles and other vulnerable road users (pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists) resulting in death and significant injuries due to a lack of side underride guards. This investigation will clearly demonstrate that NHTSA should issue a recall order pursuant to 49 U.S.C. §§ 30118(b), 30119, and 30120 for all van-type and box semitrailers that lack side underride guards.
Respectfully,
Eric Hein, Jerry and Marianne Karth, and Lois Durso
On September 14, 2021, a petition was submitted to NHTSA to investigate and recall semitrailers due to the lack of side underride guards which would prevent catastrophic injuries and deaths.
Dear Secretary Buttigieg:
In accordance with 49 U.S.C. 30162 and 49 C.F.R § 552.1, please find our petition to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to promptly initiate a safety defect investigation into van-type or box semitrailers because of a known safety hazard and defect from collisions with passenger vehicles and other vulnerable road users (pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists) resulting in death and significant injuries due to a lack of side underride guards. This investigation will clearly demonstrate that NHTSA should issue a recall order pursuant to 49 U.S.C. §§ 30118(b), 30119, and 30120 for all van-type and box semitrailers that lack side underride guards.
Respectfully,
Eric Hein, Jerry and Marianne Karth, and Lois Durso
We welcome letters of support to reinforce the importance of this vital recall.
This week, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) justifiably pointed out how their amazing safety research has led to much of the bipartisan traffic safety legislation which the Senate and House recently passed — likely to see final confirmation in the coming weeks. Thankfully, this legislation includes underride provisions — for an updated rear guard standard and further research on side underride.
What the IIHS did not mention was how long it has taken for that legislation to come about — decades. Further, they didn’t stress, as strongly as I would have, how frustrating it is that the IIHS research — coupled with recommendations from the NTSB — still doesn’t seem to be enough to warrant a straight-out mandate for side guards.
On top of that, the IIHS did not mention the missing components of the underride legislation; the infrastructure bill does not include even a hint of research regarding protection of the traveling public from deadly underride under Single Unit Trucks (otherwise known as straight or box trucks) or at the front of large trucks. And we’re talking not only about passenger vehicle occupants but, also, Vulnerable Road Users — pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists. Yet, IIHS and FMCSA have published reports about those safety hazards:
If NHTSA is truly data-driven, then shouldn’t the fact that 61% of the two-vehicle truck crash fatalities in 2019 occurred with first impact at the front of large trucks spur significant research into front underride protection? Shouldn’t we at least consider the potential for proven technology — already installed by major international truck manufacturers on their products in other countries — to make truck crashes more survivable?
Will we, instead, continue to ignore the preventable deaths which occur year after year? Perhaps might we, at least, engage in meaningful, collaborative conversation about potential solutions — active and passive — to end these tragedies? Other countries have done so.
