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Safety of Trucks and Buses on Nation's Roadways

On Wednesday, April 28, 2010, Senator Lautenberg chaired a Senate Commerce Subcommittee oversight hearing to examine the safety of trucks and buses on our nation's roads and highways. The following is Lautenberg's prepared opening statement:

“Let me welcome everyone to today's hearing as we continue this Subcommittee's work on truck and bus safety.

On an early Friday morning last month, a tractor trailer in Kentucky unexpectedly left the lane of the highway it was driving down, crossed the median and veered toward oncoming traffic. The out-of-control truck soon struck a dark green van head on. The van was carrying 15 members of an extended family -- all on their way to a relative's wedding. Ten of the passengers on board the van died -- including parents and children. The 45 year-old truck driver -- who is believed to have fallen asleep while behind the wheel -- was also killed.

It was Kentucky's worst highway crash in more than 20 years. But it was not an isolated incident. The fact is, when a car has a serious crash with a large truck -- the results are almost always fatal. Crashes with large trucks along our highways cause, on average, 14 Americans to die every single day.

Just think -- big trucks account for only 3.5 percent of all registered vehicles on our roads, yet they are involved in more than 11 percent of all motor vehicle crash deaths. Make no mistake -- our economy relies on trucks. In fact, New Jersey is home to the biggest port on the East Coast. It relies on trucks to transport goods. But as important as trucks are -- we have to remember these vehicles share the roads with our families and they are more widespread than ever before.

Between 1980 and 2000, highway capacity in our country increased by less than two percent. But during roughly that same period, the number of miles traveled by trucks grew by 100 percent. And since 2000, the number of large trucks on our highways has increased by more than a million newly registered vehicles.

As more trucks clog our highways, we have to make sure they are safe. Double- and triple-trailers don't belong on our highways -- yet a loophole in our laws allows them to endanger the public. We need to close that loophole and block these long, overweight trucks from using our National Highway System. We also need to make sure truck drivers are alert and driving safely.

While the Department of Transportation has taken some steps recently to increase safety -- including moving to ban texting while driving -- we have to do more. It is essential that we take the danger posed by tired truck drivers seriously. In the last Congress, we brought to light the flaws in hours of service regulations imposed by the Bush Administration.

Those regulations allowed drivers of large trucks to remain behind the wheel nearly 30 percent longer each week, pushing them to the brink of fatigue. These regulations were so egregious that the courts struck them down not once -- but twice. The Obama Administration has made the right move by initiating a new rulemaking on driver hours. But let's be clear -- when this process is over, we cannot wind up with the same flawed regulations that the last Administration designed.

A key way to enforce hours of service rules, combat driver fatigue and hold drivers accountable is with electronic on-board recorders, or EOBRs. A new rule was recently issued by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that will require some trucks and buses to have EOBRs. While this proposal is a modest improvement over what the last Administration suggested -- these new rules still only affect 1.3 percent of all trucking companies. That is far short of universal installation, which the National Transportation Safety Board has placed on its most-wanted list.

Electronic on board recorders should be installed on every truck and bus to protect all drivers on the roads -- whether they're driving a truck, a bus, or a family car. I look forward to working with our witnesses and my colleagues on this Committee to create commonsense solutions so that our trucking industry is safe, our economy keeps moving and our families are protected."

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