Commentary - The Fatal Flaw

Although well intended and politically popular, the approach and resultant regulations will do nothing other than degrade commercial vehicle safety. How can this be?

The premise of the regulations is to reduce fatalities suffered in crashes involving commercial motor vehicles. This would sound to be a noble cause except for two fatal flaws:

• The legislators and regulators somehow feel they have control over the outcome of crashes involving commercial motor vehicles. I actually heard a FMCSA official state that "they weren't going to focus on all CMV crashes, only the fatal ones". As any safety professional worth his or her salt can tell you, "you can control frequency (numbers of occurrences) but you can't control the severity (outcome) of vehicle crashes". Whether a crash results in a fatality (ies) or everyone walking away without a scratch is a function of literally thousands of circumstances that come together in a split second. No one has control over these circumstances nor the resultant outcomes.
  
  
• By most reliable data available, 70% to 80% of all crashes involving commercial motor vehicles were directly caused by an automobile driver involved in the crash. A recent analytical study put this number at 71%. 
  
  Although this premise is disputed by politically powerful, psuedo-safety groups such as CRASH & PATT the data is solid and irrefutable. By forcing the focus of fatality reduction on to the commercial vehicle operators through regulation the regulators have taken the focus off the main commercial motor vehicle crash causal factor......the General Motoring Public.

In order to make sustainable reductions in CMV crash fatalities, we must focus on reduction of all CMV crashes not just the ones involving fatalities. And we must involve the most significant causal factor in the reduction plan...the General Motoring Public.

Although FMCSA does have a public outreach program in the No Zone program, it is too little and it is much too late. We will never be able to improve commercial motor vehicle safety by focusing 80% of our resources on 20% of the problem.

The bubble of good news on commercial vehicle fatality reduction in 1999 will inevitably burst and the legislators and regulators will once again scramble to draft regulations for the commercial vehicle operators in an attempt to reduce fatalities.

Until we as a nation get our heads out of the sand and carefully, scientifically and purposely develop a strategy to reduce commercial vehicle fatalities........... we will continue to be doomed to failure.

When we finally decide that we want to quit pointing fingers, effectively reduce commercial motor vehicle crash fatalities, properly determine the major causal factors and take positive steps towards a common reduction goal...............we will be successful.

Commentary is by Dennis W Greany, CSP. Dennis is Senior Safety Consultant for SafeTrac Solutions, Inc, is a member of the Board of Certified Safety Professionals, a professional member of the American Society of Safety Engineers and has over 26 years experience in the trucking, construction and mining industries.

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