Truck Driver Fatigue

Sometime ago, the Maryland truck accident attorneys at Lebowitz & Mzhen Personal Injury Lawyers published a post concerning a government program that allowed foreign truck drivers access to American roads. The original program, included under the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”), granted foreign truckers narrow access to the United States’ roadways. The Bush administration widened the program and allowed foreign drivers broader access to the roads throughout this country’s border states.

American truckers and their lobbyists unsuccessfully pressured the Bush administration to reduce the breadth of foreign trucker’s use of this country’s highways, claiming that the presence of foreign drivers on interior roadways put Americans at an increased risk of injuries from truck accidents. Now, American truckers could get their wish.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed a $410 billion dollar budget bill that included a provision that would end cross border trucking. The passage of this legislation may have addressed the concerns of American truckers, but the move has angered other NAFTA signatories who claim that this bill violates America’s treaty obligations and sends a dangerous economic signal.

With Christmas and New Year’s just past, I spent a lot of time driving up and down Interstate 95, mostly along stretches of the highway that pass through the central and northern parts of Maryland, from Baltimore City up through and beyond Harford County. Not surprisingly, I encountered hundreds of tractor trailers along the way.

For a few miles, I followed one tractor trailer that was being driven in a somewhat erratic manner. I had time on my hand, and so I thought about why this driver may have been unable to drive in a completely straight fashion. Some obvious reasons came to me fast: the driver was drunk, or at least not completely sober; the driver was distracted by speaking on a cell phone; the truck operator was inexperienced.

Lastly, I thought about the one factor that is perhaps the most obvious, but often overlooked: driver fatigue. In 1990, The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) conducted a study to determine the cause of 182 heavy truck accidents that resulted in the death of the truck driver. Interestingly, the study’s primary purpose was to “assess the role of alcohol and drugs in the accidents.”
The study found, however, that the most commonly cited cause of the fatal truck accidents was fatigue. The NTSB concluded, “the 31-percent incidence of fatigue in fatal-to-the-truck driver accidents found in the 1990 study represents a valid estimate of the portion of fatal-to-the-driver heavy truck accidents that are fatigue-related.”

When Maryland truck accident attorneys represent victims and the victims’ families in truck accident cases, one of the first things we investigate is whether fatigue played a role in causing the collision.

Articles Posted in Truck Driver Fatigue

Federal Budget Bill Could End Controversial Cross Border Trucking Program

Interstate 95: Truck Drivers and Driver Fatigue That Can Be Fatal