Articles

TASA ID: 9075

If you own or operate any kind of work vehicle fleet, whether a truck transport fleet or a non-transport service fleet, you should be aware that liability from rear-end road crashes is among the biggest threats you face.  Road crashes are a looming threat to truck transport companies, including delivery operations.  They also threaten the economic welfare of light vehicle service (e.g., taxi, repair, installation) fleets in metropolitan areas or other regions.

Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among U.S. workers (NIOSH, 2003, 2015) .  Our target in this discussion is rear-end (RE) crash impacts where the transport/work vehicle is the striking vehicle.  The U.S. DOT Large Truck Crash Causation Study (LTCCS) found that about 10% of all serious injury or fatal truck crash involvements were of the RE-striking type (Knipling, 2009).  These crashes may injure truck drivers but they cause much more damage to struck light vehicles and more human harm to their occupants.     

TASA ID: 9075

If you are the owner or operator of a motor transport or other work vehicle fleet, you have probably gotten that phone call from one of your drivers.  The driver calls in to report their involvement in an on-job traffic crash.  The ensuring Q&A sequence is predictable.  You’ll first ask about location and severity.  Are you okay?  What about the other vehicle and its occupants?  Is the crash scene now secure?  Should the company send someone to the scene?

For severe crashes, that may be the gist of the initial conversation.  First things first.  But the topic of causation will always follow.  How did the crash happen?  Who was at-fault?  Any laws broken?  Are we potentially liable?  As a manager, you will ask yourself whether the crash was preventable (i.e., your driver could be blamed), what were their critical errors, and whether you should impose consequences.  For many work vehicle crashes, this sequence constitutes most of the depth and breadth of managers’ investigations of their fleet crashes.

TASA ID: 9075

An oilfield services company in South Texas employed just one mechanic to maintain its entire vehicle fleet, which included tractor-semitrailers, pickup trucks, and other work vehicles.  We will call him Mr. Alvarez, not his real name.  Mr. Alvarez worked 78-hour weeks, on average.  A typical workweek might include six 11-hour days plus being called in about twice a week for nighttime repairs, often at remote locations.  One evening he got home to his family at 8:00 pm following a two-day period in which he worked 19 hours straight followed by six overnight hours off, and then followed by another 12+-hour day.  That is 30+ hours of work in just over 36 hours.  Mr. Alvarez was a family man who liked to barbecue for his wife, autistic son, and other close family in his back yard.  He was finishing a barbecue dinner when he received a call from his supervisor to report to work.  Upon arriving there, he loaded a truck tire onto his company pickup and began a nearly two-hour drive to a remote site for a tire change.  He left the company’s gate at 12:10 am and drove at 75 mph on a state highway for about 30 minutes before striking the rear of another oil company’s tractor-semitrailer at full speed.  There was no evidence of braking or significant corrective steering prior to impact.  Mr. Alvarez was dead at the scene.

TASA ID:

According to a report by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), "Nuclear Verdicts" (defined as awards exceeding 10 million dollars) have been on a sharp rise over the last ten plus years. Not only have the number of these verdicts increased, the average award per case has also been skyrocketing. 

There are several hypotheses surrounding the reason behind this dramatic increase. Some have posited that the rise in medical costs necessitates these higher dollar awards, while others claim these increases have happened independent of other financial factors. The ATRI ranked this subject as one of its top research priorities back in 2019. They dove into the issue by looking at hundreds of cases from 2006 to 2019 within the newly created trucking litigation database. They looked at the growth of awards on average, and then did a statistical analysis in which they controlled for the other factors known to influence settlement size.

TASA ID: 9075

Do you have a safety personality behind the wheel?  Yes!  Everyone has a safety personality.  That’s because everyone has a personality, and several universal personality dimensions affect safety behavior.  Driver personality is the strongest of various personal factors affecting safety outcomes, in my opinion.  Others include driver age, gender, sensory-motor performance (e.g., reaction time), medical conditions, and mental abilities.  All of these can affect driver crash risk, sometimes strongly.  Yet it is my conclusion that driver personality exerts the greatest enduring affects.