Our Sponsors:
Ramp Publishing Group sponsors health kiosks for drivers
Does your company have a driver retention budget?
Quote of the Day
"Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall."
-- Stephen R. Covey
TCA Responds to Critical Coverage
In response to a series of articles in the popular press that were critical of the trucking industry and its safety record, the Truckload Carriers Association sent out a press release that addressed many of the issues raised in the articles while pointing out the true nature of the industry. Excerpts from the press release appear below. Inside Trucking encourages its readers to share this positive side of the story with the editors of their respective hometown newspapers.
Media’s Reckless Portrayal of Trucking
The recent appearance of articles claiming the federal government has eased trucking regulations have portrayed the trucking industry as one comprised of large unsafe trucks traveling with reckless abandon on our nation’s highways. In fact, the federal government has done the opposite. What these articles fail to point out is that trucks travel on our nation’s highways on a daily basis and without incident. Traveling in the safest, most professional manner, the trucking industry travels approximately 115 billion miles each year. This is the equivalent of making 115,000 cross-country trips per day.
Public perception driven by misrepresented statistics has made trucking an embattled industry – an industry in which opinions expressed in such limelight display trucks in a glare of negative publicity. For every negative story that is printed about the trucking industry, there are many positive attributes often left unsaid.
Condemning an industry without expressing the whole story is misleading and irresponsible. . . . What many of these articles neglect to do is tell the full story about trucking by looking closely at the relevant statistics. [For example] the large truck fatal crash rate dropped 22 percent from 1993 to 2003. According to a study by the AAA Foundation, in fatal crashes involving a truck and another motor vehicle, police assigned one or more unsafe driving factors to the passenger vehicle driver and no factors to the truck drivers in 73 percent of all the cases, again statistics that are not mentioned.
Barry Pottle, TCA chairman and president of Pottle’s Transportation, stated that the industry has spent millions of dollars on studies regarding fatigue and technology to further safety enhancements in the rig itself and on driver training programs. He went on to say that “the industry truly believes that better education, cooperation and courtesy are critical to making our highways safer for everyone. The trucking industry is committed to continually improving highway safety in communities across America. And we stand ready to do even more.”
What is most disappointing is that these reports completely ignore the role this industry plays in the economy and the professionalism of its drivers. The trucking industry is the catalyst of the freight distribution system, hauling nearly 70 percent of all domestic freight transportation tonnage in the United States and accounting for more than 80 percent of the nation’s freight bill. Over 80 percent of the communities in the U.S. receive their goods exclusively from trucks. The trucking industry employs more than 8.6 million people or one in 15 civilian workers. The realization that trucking plays an important role in public safety would be an understatement. As the dominant mode of freight transportation, trucking is projected to haul 13 billion tons of freight by 2016, compared with 10 billion tons in 2005.
States TCA President Chris Burruss: “The public must recognize that every truck is driven by a mother, father, brother or sister who has one goal in mind: to deliver their needed cargo, do so safely, and make it home to their loved ones. They carry the education, health and dreams of our families on their trailers each and every day, 365 days a year. They have a sense of commitment and a work ethic that is rarely seen in other industries today. Many of these drivers do so while logging in excess of a million miles without an accident. This would represent tens of thousands of trips back and forth to work for those of us who commute by car.”
On behalf of the millions of truck drivers whose office is their truck and the highways their workplace, it is the industry’s sincere hope that these drivers will be recognized for the true nature of what they do each day and not be penalized by misleading manipulations of the truth.
