Of special interest to me was the information in both of his Comments on 1969 rulemaking:
“I will begin by pointing out that continuing to allow truck and trailer induced PCI to occur at otherwise survivable crash speeds (delta-V’s of 45mph and beyond) discards years of crashworthiness efforts and wastes the safety benefits we have come to expect and pay for in our cars.
From an engineering perspective the need for vehicle crash compatibility in the form of adequate heavy truck underride guarding is apparent in order to protect against the hazard of PCI which exposes the vulnerable head and neck region to severe, potentially fatal or crippling injury.
This hazard – easily remedied by readily available materials and simple structural analysis – is present also on the sides of heavy trailers and trucks. The FMVSS standard should be broadened to include guarding for the sides and rear of heavy straight trucks, as well as the sides of heavy trailers. This was the original intent of NHTSA rulemakers in the 1969 NPRM, Docket No. 1-11; Notice 2.”
A proposed upgrade to rear underride guard regulations for tractor-trailers is a move in the right direction but isn’t comprehensive enough to deliver the safety gains IIHS outlined in a 2011 petition for rulemaking, especially when it comes to preventing underride in offset crashes. . .
Thank you, IIHS, for your ongoing involvement in underride protection.
Regarding the above noted proposed rulemaking, I support fully a new rear guard standard that exceeds the Canadian standard, which was developed some time ago and that current research shows does not provide adequate passenger compartment protection in all crash scenarios. I also support fully that the new standard apply to all trucks including single unit ones. I believe the NHTSA has overestimated the costs and underestimated the benefits of such changes. More importantly, however, we must modernize the very way we think about road safety in the United States and Canada. We need to make the default design for every car, truck and bus to be one that simply minimizes all levels of human harm.
The use of a cost-benefit analysis for motor vehicle design and upgrades represents outdated thinking. The air, marine and rail industries have a much more forward approach when it comes to safety and more often works to ensure that these modes are safe for all persons. We must do the same with motor vehicles as the use of cost-benefit analysis involves assigning a monetary value to a human life and it is unethical and crass to do that.
Thank you for considering my comments on this important matter.
With the formal Public Comment period on the rear underride rulemaking for trailers now closed, recently-submitted comments have been posted and can be viewed at these links:
We are grateful that Wabash has taken the initiative to improve rear underride protection on the trailers which they manufacture, as seen on their website: RIG-16 REAR UNDERRIDE GUARD SYSTEM
RIG-16 REAR UNDERRIDE GUARD SYSTEM
For the past three years, Wabash National has spent considerable time, capital and facility resources in R&D specifically focused on enhancing rear impact guard performance. As part of these efforts, we conducted numerous crash tests, and consulted and worked with some of the premiere testing facilities in the country. The new RIG-16 system is designed to:
Prevent vehicle underride in multiple offset impact scenarios
Better absorb and deflect vehicle impact at any point along the bumper
Exceed U.S. (FMVSS) and Canadian (CMVSS) requirements
Key Design Features
To achieve our performance objectives, our engineering and product development teams incorporated a number of design enhancements that are engineered to work together, as a system, to better absorb energy and deflect impact.
Engineered a bolt-on, integrated rear impact guard system that better absorbs and deflects impact energy
Added two vertical bumper legs to the design for a total of four
Placed the outer vertical bumper legs closer to the sides of the trailer
Constructed the bumper legs and tube of a higher-strength steel
Hot-dip galvanized the assembly
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2015/0258951 and other patents pending
The following is a post on The Underride Network by Stephen Hadley who lost his wife in a side underride crash twenty years ago. He expressed his concern about side underride protection and about how Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 12866 has made it difficult to pass effective government agency rules.
Two life-long best friends each had little sisters that were also life-long friends. I and my best friend were riding in the back seat of a drivers education car when we crashed into someone’s front yard. My best friend’s big brother married the little sister driving that car, a few years later, she died underneath the side of a truck trailer. My wife Tamara Hadley, the other little sister died underneath the rear of an illegally parked truck trailer with a Clinton rear underride guard. President Bill Clinton updated Ronald Reagan’s Executive orders establishing cost-benefit analysis with Executive Order 12866. These orders limiting corporate costs of safety regulations have made it almost impossible to pass effective government agency rules for over twenty years. . .
. . . NHTSA wants to just legalize the guards already on the road as did the Clinton Administration twenty years ago. Studies could not find statistical improvement in lives saved by these guards. We estimate at least 6,000 extra Americans died because the administration blocked better guards that had been tested at higher speeds. We call these rear guards of the last twenty years the Clinton guillotine guards. If the new regulation by the Obama Administration is approved as presented to just legalize existing guards, they will now be known as Obama guillotine guards. . . . . . We have fought for Vision Zero regulatory safeguards to replace Clinton cost-benefit rules for twenty years to save thousands of lives. Destroying the meaning of Vision Zero and the meaning of side guards will cripple our efforts for national rules and regulations. Cost-benefit analysis has killed tens of thousands of Americans and given us corporate control of our government and portions of our economy. . . Total truck related fatalities in 2013 were 3,964, 338 were pedestrians and 78 were bicyclists or about 10.5% were vulnerable road users. 585 or 15% of total fatal crashes were to the side of the truck in cars in 2013. Most fatal victims die in crashes to the front of the truck. If we design side skirts that only save vulnerable road users we will only save a small percentage of victims leaving most victims including many children to die in car crashes. Many of my friends lost their children in these crashes. . . Vision Zero means stop killing the children! Even those unworthy souls in cars too! Work with us to save lives, not against us. Over a million Americans have been killed and injured in crashes with trucks. A bad law in America can kill tens or hundreds of thousands overseas as our regulations are copied or not exceeded around the globe. Easily, the Clinton guards in the last twenty years killed a hundred thousand extra souls around the world which would have been saved with available stronger rear guards.
In our efforts to not only improve regulatory federal standards on underride guards but, also, to catalyze voluntary industry improvement, we heard back from several companies to whom we had written, including:
UPS in Atlanta (Dan)
CR England (Chad England)
Extra Mile Transportation (Brent)
J.B. Hunt (GreerWoodruff, Lowell, AK
UPS (buys from Great Dane)
FedEx
Chad England committed his company to looking into the matter seriously. (CR England) And Dean Engelage (Great Dane) invited Jerry and I to visit their Research & Design Center in Savannah in June 2014:
Jerry,
We’re looking forward to hosting you and your wife next week. I thought we would start the day off with an 8:30 am breakfast at a local favorite, J. Christopher’s which is near the hotel 122 E Liberty Street. Brandie Fuller, our VP of Marketing, will join us. Parking for the restaurant is street-side at a meter.
We’ll then head to the Great Dane office which is also close by. A series of meetings and a tour of our R&D lab followed by lunch. If all goes as planned we should be finished right after lunch.
I look forward to meeting you both and safe travels to Savannah. If you have any questions, please email me or call me.
I am in receipt of your letter and packet dated 17 Feb 14.
First, let me offer you my most sincere condolences on the loss of your beautiful daughters. I have a daughter who is two months shy of her 18th birthday, so I do not even want to imagine the heartache associated with this tragedy. I can only offer you my most sincere respect in working to turn such a tragedy into something good.
Extra Mile Transportation is a non-asset based, third party freight broker. That means that we don’t own any equipment, we contract out for everything we move. However, we are in a position to exert some influence on this matter. By copy of this email, I am requesting our Director of Logistical Solutions incorporate this awareness campaign into some of his efforts. I will be meeting with him to go over this issue and we’ll see what impact we may have.
I wish you only the best for the times you share with your other children and hope that your memories of Mary and AnnaLeah continue to have a positive impact on our safety.
All in all, we are hopeful that the combination of calling for both more appropriate regulations through Vision Zero rulemaking and, at the same time, voluntary action will yield the desired result–SAVED LIVES. Together, we can do this!
The Public Comment Period closed on February 16, but not all of the submitted comments have been posted yet. The proposed rear underride rule can be seen here along with all of the posted comments: NPRM Upgrade Underide
On the question of whether used trailers should be retrofitted in order to make them safer (better able to protect against deadly underride crashes), here is an opinion from one person who recently submitted a public comment. . .
Decision not to require used trailers to be retrofitted (end of Section 7, page 32):
“You state that your analysis indicates such a retrofitting requirement would be very costly without sufficient safety benefits. If more lives would be saved and more injuries would be prevented by requiring new trailers to meet the new standards, then logic dictates that more lives would be saved and more injuries would be prevented by requiring used trailers to be retrofitted.
“Indeed, the crash tests cited for new trailers of different manufacturers tested on a Chevy Malibu suggest substantial disparities. It can be expected that the disparities would be magnified if tests were conducted on some of the used equipment in the nation’s fleet. If it is not worth the cost to retrofit an old trailer (in which case it should be scrapped), that should be the decision of its owner rather than the decision of NHTSA.” See more of his comments here: Comment from D. J. Young, III
Jerry was pleasantly surprised tonight by a phone call from Greer Woodruff, Vice President of Safety & Security at J.B. Hunt. J. B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. is a trucking and transportation company that was founded by Johnnie Bryan Hunt, and based in the Northwest Arkansas city of Lowell.
Greer was calling to let Jerry know that Wabash National, a trailer manufacturer, had redesigned their rear underride guard to provide better protection at the outer edges of the guard. And he also wanted us to know that J.B. Hunt was the first to purchase the new trailers–having ordered 4,000 of them in January.
But then Greer went on to say that he had wanted to be sure and tell us about it and thank us for the letters, which Jerry wrote to J.B. Hunt–along with the major trailer manufacturers and many other trailer buyers, back in 2014 before we launched our first petition. Those letters, he said, had raised their awareness about the underride problem and spurred them on to talk to the trailer manufacturers about producing safer trailers.
That brought a smile to Jerry’s face.
We look forward to finding out more details about its design features and what level of protection it provides. Also, we hope to see additional attention given to side and front underride protection and retrofitting existing trailers as well.
Meanwhile, we are encouraged to see that progress is being made in moving toward the best possible protection with both voluntary and regulatory action. The Vision Zero Petition Book has arrived!
First set of letters which Jerry sent to trailer buyers in February 2014 (a variation of this went to trailer manufacturers):
One of the letters which went out to trailer manufacturers in February 2014:
A second set of letters went out in March 2014 to clarify our role/position:
Another letter went out asking for support to our petition request for stronger underride guards:
And then Jerry sent a follow-up letter in the fall of 2014, including with it copies of the IIHS Status Reports which had articles on underride guards:
IIHS Status Reports with articles on underride guards, which we included with the letters to the trucking companies:
Finally, after setting up our non-profit, AnnaLeah & Mary for Truck Safety, in the summer of 2015, we wrote to all of the truck companies again–asking for their help to voluntarily find safer underride guard designs:
Also, sometime after our letter writing, we were discussing our efforts with JohnLannen at the Truck Safety Coalition. He asked for our list and said, “Thanks – I’ll follow up with Greer since I know him well. What reaction did you get?”
In our efforts to not only improve regulatory federal standards on underride guards but, also, to catalyze voluntary industry improvement, we heard back from several other companies to whom we had written, including:
Photo Album of Jerry and his girls: With Dad. . . Family Man Jerry prays for his children every morning (lifting them before their heavenly Father/Abba). He is proud of them, teases them, enjoys spending time with them, and treasures each of his special children.
Jerry shares our story at the Fall 2015 Sorrow to Strength conference in DC hosted by the Truck Safety Coalition:
