Bigger Big Rigs Bearing Down on Highways Amid Safety Debate

The tractor-trailer, packed with trash, weighed 40 tons--roughly 76,000 pounds more than the Ford Explorer it was about to crush.

“Oh my God,” thought Lillian Carch, “doesn’t he see us here?”

The truck lurched over the lane divider and struck the side of the utility vehicle. Desperate, Peter Carch floored it, but the 18-wheeler veered into the car a second time, catching the rear of the Explorer and spinning it around 180 degrees.

“I could see his lights coming directly at us . . . ,” Lillian Carch said. “He came at us real hard. There was a tremendous impact.”

And then this Pennsylvania family--Peter and Lillian, and their 18-year-old daughter, Laura--joined a statistical community, the 100,000 Americans who are injured each year in one-sided confrontations with the big rigs that increasingly dominate the nation’s roads.

The big trucks are relied upon to deliver the things Americans want to buy to the places where they want to buy them. “As long as we keep consuming, and building Best Buy stores, people are going to expect that those stores have the products they advertise,” said Chris Hoover, a spokesman for the American Trucking Assns.

But there is a price that must be paid, and on the evening of March 24, 1995, on Interstate 78 in New Jersey, the bill came due for the Carches.

Lillian and Peter, though battered and bruised, were saved by their seat belts. But the impact hurled Laura--state tennis champ, high school homecoming queen--32 feet onto the pavement, snapping her neck.

Five thousand people lose their lives in collisions with trucks each year. Doctors saved Laura. Though they said she would never walk again, by June 1997 she was able--just barely--to hit a tennis ball over the net.

The driver of the truck was unhurt. In fact, he drove away without stopping; he later told authorities that he was unaware that he had hit a car. He thought it was just a deer, he said.

Truck traffic has jumped 25% on the nation’s highways since 1990--and a whopping 50% on city and town roads. The number of big rigs on the road is expected to climb at least another 14% in the next seven years.

As the number of trucks on the road has increased, the safety record of the industry has improved, said James Lewis, a spokesman for the ATA. But as the accident rate for trucks (and for cars as well) improves, the increasing number of big rigs on the road has kept the death rate from trucks at a consistent 5,000 per year. Critics fear U.S. highways are reaching the saturation point.

Although large trucks account for only 3% of vehicles on the road and 7% of miles driven, they are involved in 12% of the nation’s road deaths. And of those deaths, 75% are occupants of the other vehicle, and 10% are pedestrians, bicyclists and bystanders.

Lewis points out that studies of police reports show that mistakes made by drivers of cars cause 72% of the accidents involving trucks. But it is the size of those trucks that can make such mistakes particularly costly.

Washington state researchers found that double and triple trailer rigs have a threefold increased risk of crashes compared to single trailers. And the risks of fatal crashes climb sharply with weight. An 80,000-pound big rig is twice as likely to be involved in a fatal accident as a 50,000-pound truck.

Lewis disputed those figures, maintaining that triple trailers have the lowest accident rate of any vehicles on the road. For example, he said, Nevada statistics for 1993 show that triples had only .64 accidents per million road miles compared with 1.7 for singles and doubles. The reason, he said, is that triples are the most heavily regulated, best-maintained vehicles on the road, are driven by the best drivers and operate only during good weather.

But critics say the sheer size of these triples makes accidents involving them a terrifying prospect, regardless of the rate at which they occur.

Some truck companies are pushing for federal approval of longer, heavier vehicles to cut down on their costs, including more widespread use of controversial triple trailers, which are currently limited under a 1990 federal freeze.

Lewis said the ATA is not seeking to increase the size of trucks currently allowed by law, but is asking for “a common-sense adjustment in the current freeze on large combination vehicles and where else it makes sense to allow them.” The ATA is not asking that triples be allowed on busy city interchanges, he said. But in some cases, such as in Denver, the freeze limits triples to older roads while banning them from newer ones where they could operate more safely.

The ATA points to a 1994 General Accounting Office study that found expanded use of larger trucks could reduce the industry’s operating costs by about 3%, or $3.4 billion annually. Bigger trucks and more trailers also mean less air pollution and fewer vehicles on the road, the ATA notes.

But according to Lewis, the main reason for the push for triples is that there is a nationwide shortage of truck drivers, and triples mean fewer drivers can haul bigger loads.

The state Assembly in California, one of the states targeted for increased use of triples, has gone on record as opposing any relaxation of the current federal freeze.

So has the American Automobile Assn., which contends that longer trucks mix poorly with passenger vehicles, even when they don’t collide.

An AAA study on cars riding alongside trucks found “the splash and spray problem on long doubles is great and could create a substantially increased automobile accident rate for temporarily blinded motorists in inclement weather.”

The fight against triples is a rallying cry for San Francisco-based CRASH, or Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways, which has organized families of big-rig accident victims.

“Triples are the equivalent of a 10-story building barreling down the highway on its side,” said Michael Scippa, executive director of CRASH, which receives a major share of its funding from railroads, traditional rivals of the trucking industry.

Deborah Drown of Apple Valley, Calif., joined CRASH after her sister, brother-in-law and their two children, ages 17 and 9, were incinerated when they smashed into a jackknifed double gasoline tanker on Interstate 10. The truck driver told authorities one of his brakes locked up.

“The truck that was involved in my sister’s crash was written up the day before for brake violations,” Drown said. “But it left the terminal anyway. Was that just an oversight?”

Lewis said the ATA makes no excuses for the minority of truckers who behave irresponsibly. The group supports more roadside truck inspections and random drug and alcohol testing of drivers, he said. It favors banning radar detectors from trucks and supports the 55 mph speed limit.

But safety violations continue despite efforts that all sides agree have helped reduce the number of accidents in the last 20 years.

In June, authorities in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County threw up a checkpoint and inspected 266 trucks. They wrote up 225 for infractions--and had to pull 61 trucks and 41 drivers off the highway because of serious safety hazards.

The pressure to keep the trucks in service, especially for smaller companies or owner-operators, is intense in an industry with a low profit margin.

“They’re making their truck payment, they’re paying the upkeep, they have to make the mortgage payment,” said Mike Kvammen of South Pasadena, who drove doubles for 15 of his 20 years steering big rigs. Some find that after expenses, they are making little more than minimum wage.

The pressure for fast delivery not only threatens truck safety, it pushes drivers to the breaking point. A Labor Department study identified truck driving as the most dangerous occupation in the United States.

One 1986 survey found as many as 29% of truck drivers had drugs with a potential for abuse in their bloodstream.

“In my own day, I’d take a Black Beauty [an amphetamine] or two to keep awake,” Kvammen admitted.

In June, a big-rig driver trying to run a load of onions from California to New York in 72 hours to win a $1,000 bonus led Pennsylvania police on a 97-mile chase. Robert Carney hit vehicles, forced autos off the road and smashed into police cars before he was finally stopped by tire-shredding strips. He said someone had given him stimulants.

“I’d been up five or six days . . . I pushed too hard, I guess I pushed too hard,” Carney said at the time.

Federal “hours of service” rules limit truckers to 10 hours’ driving and five hours’ non-driving work per day--an amount safety advocates say is already excessive. But some truckers ignore the limits, said Bob Nicklas, spokesman for the Teamsters. Their logs are so frequently falsified, Nicklas says, that they are “fairy tales.”

When an owner-operators’ group surveyed its own members, it found that 85% admitted violating federal hours of service rules at least a quarter of the time.

The figures are even worse on long-haul routes. On trips of 1,200 miles or more, researchers estimate that more than half the drivers violate federal limits.

The Teamsters and activists blame deregulation and economic pressure.

“The companies say you have to get from Dover, Del., to San Antonio, Texas, in a certain time,” Nicklas said. “They literally book routes so the only way you can make it is by violating the hours of service.”

Unionized truckers can refuse, Nicklas said, but independents and nonunion drivers can be fired on the spot.

On Oct. 10, 1993, 17-year-old Jeffrey Izer of Lisbon, Maine, and three friends pulled into the breakdown lane of the Maine Turnpike when their car sputtered.

“The tractor-trailer driver fell asleep,” said Jeffrey’s mother, Daphne Izer. “He ran right over the top of them and killed them all. He was never charged in the accident. He eventually got four months for falsifying the log book.”

That punishment, she said, came only because of intense local publicity. Usually, such violators merely mail in a fine.

Daphne and her husband, Steve Izer, founded Parents Against Tired Truckers, or PATT, which is pushing to reduce the hours of service for truck drivers to 12 hours’ work in a 24-hour day.

But changing the laws is difficult in Washington, where the ATA and associated political action committees poured $6.5 million in campaign contributions between 1993 and 1996.

That’s what Beth Hall learned after her father died one night in 1993 on Route 313 in Pennsylvania when a tractor-trailer jackknifed on the highway, blocking all lanes. Carl Hall apparently spotted the lights on the cab and swerved left to avoid it.

Instead, he smashed under the darkened trailer that he could not see, and was killed instantly.

Beth Hall began a campaign to put reflective tape on truck trailers manufactured before January 1, 1993, when better lighting was required. She estimates the cost per truck at $50.

She met with then-Transportation Secretary Federico Pena more than a year ago to push for federal rules requiring the tape.

“He thought reflective tape would be easy. I’d meet with [his deputies] every few months. They kept saying, ‘Yes, reflective tape is going.’ They thought it would be out by this spring,” Hall said.

Now, her latest estimate is 1999. And then truckers could have two years to appeal.

“That’s just too long,” the bewildered Hall said. “Why would anyone oppose this? Why would anyone want to kill somebody?”