“TEAM Underride,” a loosely-organized coalition of engineers, researchers, safety advocates, and families of underride victims have planned multiple underride crash tests, underride crash test events, and a vigil for underride victims. Two of those events were in D.C. — an D.C. Underride Crash Test Eventon March 26, 2019 in the Audi Field parking lot one mile from DOT and an Underride Victim Vigil in September 2023 on the sidewalk in front of the DOT building on New Jersey Avenue in D.C.
Despite multiple communications inviting the Department of Transportation, and especially NHTSA who is responsible for underride rulemaking, to these events, less than a handful of department representatives have shown up. What’s with that? What don’t they want to see? What they should want to see is honest to goodness research being undertaken to solve the decades-old problem of Death By Underride — proof-positive that the ball is in their court to issue regulations which could end countless preventable tragedies.
I emailed multiple people at DOT on January 11, 2019 — inviting them to our March crash test. Then, on February 6, 2019, after Lois Durso and I had checked out the Audi Field parking lot and walked over to DOT from there, we hand delivered a stack of event flyers and asked that they be distributed. I was told, “We will make sure that the event flyers are distributed.” Only one person — from FMCSA, which is not primarily responsible for underride rulemaking — bothered to come. Two months isn’t enough notice to put it in their schedule (no travel approval necessary)?
On July 11, 2023, I sent an online scheduling request to the Office of the Secretary — hoping that Secretary Buttigieg could attend the August 3, 2023, Raleigh Underride Crash Test Event. I followed up with an email to the Office of the Secretary. On July 19, I received this reply:
Unfortunately, DOT will not be able to send a representative to the event in Raleigh. Our team is sorry this didn’t work out, but we’re grateful for your continued advocacy and safety work and look forward to continued collaboration.
Raleigh Underride Crash Test Event, August 3, 2023
I received a reply on August 23, 2024, to my August 5 request for the Secretary — or someone from the Department — to come to the Raleigh Underride Crash Test Event on September 13, 2024. I understand that Secretary Buttigieg could not fit it into his schedule, but the response was rather disturbing — though not surprising:
Thank you very much for the follow-up. Unfortunately, DOT won’t be able to send a representative for this event. We’re very sorry it won’t work out this time, and we are sending our best for an impactful event next month.
On June 28, 2024, the Advisory Committee on Underride Protection (ACUP) completed a scathing critique of the Department of Transportation. In a 410-page report, it documented a long history of agency reluctance to regulate the trucking industry’s safety practices, exposed allegations of misconduct by senior officials, and called for the reversal of recent rulemaking that the committee believed made “no substantial progress” to improving public safety.
In its Biennial Report, commissioned by Congress in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the committee contended that fatalities from underride crashes, in which large commercial trucks cause severe injuries to occupants of passenger vehicles, as well as pedestrians, bicyclists or motorcyclists, are largely preventable. But the committee found that, for over 50 years, the Department has not required manufacturers to install guards under the open sides of trailers, due to pressure from the industry.
The report exposed allegations from a whistleblower of serious misconduct. According to a former project manager at the Department in the agency that enforces rules for the trucking industry, senior Department officials in the Trump administration suppressed taxpayer-funded research into the cost-effectiveness of regulations requiring side guards on trucks. Trucking company lobbyists reportedly were angered by the research findings and pressed the Department to alter them. Officials in the Biden administration commenced a rulemaking process that ignored the key findings of the suppressed research. The report called upon the Biden administration to reverse course and start the rulemaking process over again, this time by counting the benefits it previously ignored. Advocates have asked the Inspector General to investigate.
Many of the ACUP’s critiques and recommendations were adopted over the objections of the trucking industry, which lacked the ability to veto the committee’s actions. They published their dissent in a minority report authored by the CEO of Utility Trailer Manufacturing Corporation, which recently was found negligent for the fiery death of a 16 year-old boy in a side underride crash. Utility’s share of the punitive damages was $18.9 million.
The committee, which was composed of engineers, emergency medical professionals, victims, safety advocates, law enforcement, and the trucking industry, sent its Report via NHTSA to Congress and the Secretary of Transportation on July 2, 2024.
Below are links to the complete ACUP Biennial Report, the Majority Report, a Minority Report, and Appendices, including the statements of concurrence or dissent from ACUP members:
Families of underride victims gathered on September 14, 2023, in front of the U.S. Department of Transportation at 1200 New Jersey Ave SE in Washington, DC — with crash test cars from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety 2017 side underride research in the background — to remember loved ones, who lost their lives due to truck underride. The families rang a commemorative bell for over 750 victims, primarily from the last few years, and called upon the Department to re-evaluate publicly available data, end their decades of inaction, and issue strong underride regulations.
Dr. Elisa Braver, epidemiologist and safety researcher
Andy Young, The Law Firm for Truck Safety
Barry Davis, father of underride victim Ally Davis
Lois Durso, mother of underride victim Roya Sadigh
Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
Sean O’Malley, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety
Abbie Bingham Endicott, cousin of underride victim Sylvia Bingham
Daniel Langenkamp (husband of underride victim Sarah Langenkamp) read a statement from Stephen Bingham, father of underride victim Sylvia Bingham
Nancy Avis, cousin of underride victim Carling Mott
Harry Adler, Institute for Safer Trucking
Jerry and Marianne Karth, parents of underride victims AnnaLeah & Mary Karth
“Underride crashes, which occur when a car slides underneath the body of a truck, have tragically become all too common on our highways. These crashes are preventable. Underride guards on large trucks save lives. I urge @NHTSAgov to implement stronger protections without delay,” said Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. “I would be remiss if I did not mention all the survivors and family members who are turning their personal tragedy into advocacy. We could not do this without you.”
Underride Victim Families Appeal to Secretary Pete Buttigieg
We’ve been anticipating the final result of a year-long investigation by @propublica and @frontlinepbs on the truck underride issue. Their team pulled together an immense amount of information on a century-old problem. Of course, an hour could never cover it all. But I think that they created a compelling argument. The question is, what did you think?
If you haven’t had a chance to see the documentary or read the accompanying stories, here are some useful links:
My next question is, what are you going to do in response to what you heard and/or read? And what kind of reaction and action should we hope to see from:
Congress?
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (who declined to be interviewed)?
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration?
USDOT Inspector General?
Trucking Industry?
Anyone can act on their personal convictions and sign our petition: Secretary Pete, It’s Past Time To End Death By Underride! We will be submitting a spreadsheet of all signatures & comments made on the petition to Secretary Buttigieg and to the NHTSA Public Comment docket for the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Side Guards. Here are some other things you can do: How You Can Help!
What do I think? Among other things. . . I think that we need a Congressional Oversight Underride Field Hearing and an investigation by the DOT Inspector General. I’d also like the opportunity to have a meeting with Secretary Buttigieg to discuss underride. Beyond that, I think that we need a long-term solution for this and other roadway safety issues. I think that we need a National Traffic Safety Ombudsman, in place at the USDOT Office of the Secretary, whose role will be to ensure that the voice of victims is appropriately heard and heeded — so that industry no longer has a disproportionate, unfair voice.
Recent months have brought progress in the right direction to solve the truck underride problem. A PBS/Frontline documentary focused on underride will be aired on Tuesday, June 13, 10/9 Central. See the trailer here, America’s Dangerous Trucks. Spread the word! Breakout stories and articles:
We are launching a new online petition to take advantage of the national attention this broadcast will bring to the hidden problem of underride. Please sign & share:Secretary Pete, It’s Past Time To End Death By Underride! These signatures & comments will be submitted to NHTSA.
In April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced members of the Advisory Committee on Underride Protection. The first ACUP meeting was on May 25. This diverse group, with both industry and safety advocates represented, will be making recommendations to Secretary Pete/NHTSA about how to end Death By Underride.
At the same time, NHTSA published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) for a potential side guard regulation. Add your voice to our message. Submit a Public Comment (by July 20) here in support of requiring side guards on all new trucks. Help us to bring this long-overdue rule across the finish line.
A detailed cost benefit analysis of truck side guards was presented on August 26 at a TEAM Underride Zoom meeting. Eric Hein, father of 2015 side underride victim Riley Hein, originally completed this report in May 2021 and submitted it to NHTSA. In May 2022, he updated the analysis and report and again submitted it to NHTSA for consideration. See it here:
A cost-benefit analysis provides estimates of the anticipated benefits that are expected to accrue over a specified period and compares them to the anticipated costs. USDOT guidance ensures that the economic costs and benefits of road safety measures can be monetized and compared, leading to informed decision making. Delve into this cost benefit analysis to see how Eric arrives at these conclusions:
Over 15 years of phasing in, SUGs on new semi-trailers would save at least 3,560 lives and prevent 35,598 serious injuries.
An SUG with an aerodynamic skirt would offset their entire cost in the first year.
A SUG regulation is cost effective because the benefits of side underride guards substantially outweigh the costs.
Then answer the question: Should Secretary Buttigieg be able to determine that a side guard regulation would be cost-effective and therefore is “warranted”?
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) conducted an important crash test on March 30, 2017. They crashed a car at 35 mph into the side of a trailer equipped with AngelWing side guards. This crash test was later repeated successfully at 40 mph at the Second Underride Roundtable on August 29, 2017. It was official. Deadly side underride tragedies could be prevented.
What seemed perhaps even more significant was the fact that the following day, March 31, 2017, the IIHS conducted a second crash test into the side of a trailer — only this time, there was no side guard. The stark contrast of the two crashes was captured on film for all to see. Who could argue the benefit of this feasible feat of engineering technology?
Apparently it has not been enough to convince everyone, as we are still struggling to bring this uphill battle to an end five years later. Pray that Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, who is tasked by Congress with making a determination this year, will conclude that saving lives is worth the cost to require trailer manufacturers to equip new trailers with side guards. Otherwise, the inaction of industry and government will allow the senseless, violent slaughter of unprotected road users to continue day after day, year after year — while engineering solutions sit on the shelf gathering dust.
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
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?
