According to the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, thousands of motorist are killed each year by large trucks -- those weighing more than 10,000 pounds. 18-wheelers, semi-trucks, tractor-trailers and semis fall into this category.
In 2003 alone, large trucks accounted for 8 percent of all vehicles involved in fatal crashes and 4 percent of all vehicles involved in injury and property-damage-only crashes.
Leading paragraph from The New York Times article series discussing deregulation. This one applies to the trucking industry and regulation on drivers hours.
As Dorris Edwards slowed for traffic near Kingdom City, Mo., on her way home from a Thanksgiving trip in 2004, an 18-wheeler slammed into her Jeep Cherokee.
The Bush administration has installed trucking officials, including Duane W. Acklie, left, and David S. Addington, in influential posts to advance its agenda of loosening regulations on the industry.
The truck crushed the sport-utility vehicle and shoved it down an embankment off Interstate 70. Ms. Edwards, 62, was killed.
The truck driver accepted blame for the accident, and Ms. Edwards’s family filed a lawsuit against the driver and the trucking company.
In the course of pursuing its case, the family broached a larger issue: whether the Bush administration’s decision to reject tighter industry regulation and instead reduce what officials viewed as cumbersome rules permitted a poorly trained trucker to stay behind the wheel, alone, instead of resting after a long day of driving.
After intense lobbying by the politically powerful trucking industry, regulators a year earlier had rejected proposals to tighten drivers’ hours and instead did the opposite, relaxing the rules on how long truckers could be on the road. That allowed the driver who hit Ms. Edwards to work in the cab nearly 12 hours, 8 of them driving nonstop, which he later acknowledged had tired him.
Government officials had also turned down repeated requests from insurers and safety groups for more rigorous training for new drivers. The driver in the fatal accident was a rookie on his first cross-country trip; his instructor, a 22-year-old with just a year of trucking experience, had been sleeping in a berth behind the cab much of the way.
