Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Federal safety officials missed their own deadline Friday for making new rules about dangerous trucks.

A 76-year-old man in LA county was hit by a truck while riding his bike in 2008. Republicans want to keep current trucking laws in place that Democrats and others say lead to driver fatigue, causing accidents like this one. Photo: Aitken Aitken Cohn

October 28 was the original deadline by which the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was supposed to announce new hours-of-service regulations for trucking, but in the end, they gave themselves another month to do it.

The pending change is the result of a lawsuit brought by Public Citizen, the Teamsters Union, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the Truck Safety Coalition against the FMCSA to tighten the standards. The suit resulted in an agreement that the FMCSA would change the current 11-hour driving day and the 34-hour rest period before starting a long workweek to a 10-hour driving day, keeping the 34-hour “restart” but with new restrictions.

The Bush-era rule has been struck down twice before by the courts, but the FMCSA kept reinstating it — first in late 2007 and then about a year later. This time, the agency appears ready to make a change.

The 11-hour rule was a “midnight regulation” made during President George W. Bush’s final days in office, according to the Teamsters. The Bush administration increased the workweek from 60 to 77 hours of driving and reduced the restart period from 50 hours to 34.

The Teamsters say truck crashes cost the nation $20 billion in 2009, and that truck driver fatigue is a major factor in truck crashes. Some statistics indicate fatigue is a factor in 30 to 40 percent of truck crashes, though the FMCSA itself puts the number at 5.5 percent.

“We will continue to push for a rule that protects truck drivers, instead of the greed of the trucking industry,” said Teamsters President Jim Hoffa when the court case was decided two years ago. “Longer hours behind the wheel are dangerous for our members and the driving public.”

The problem isn’t limited to highways. Six percent of pedestrian fatalities and nine percent of bicyclist fatalities in 2009 were caused by crashes with large trucks, according to the NHTSA. Between 1996 and 2005, crashes with large trucks accounted for almost a third of all cyclist fatalities in New York City, according to a joint report by NYC agencies [PDF].

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Photo: TreeHugger

This week, the Safe Routes to School National Conference convenes in Minneapolis, a progressive city determined to become the most bicycle friendly in the nation. But even here, far from the nation’s capital, in a region celebrated for its massive greenway system, drama inside the Beltway has instilled an air of urgency to the event.

In 2005, SAFETEA-LU (Safe, Accountable, Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act) created the federal Safe Routes to School program to get more kids to bike and walk to school by improving infrastructure and creating encouragement programs that make those active trips safe and appealing. The funding for the program is but a tiny drop in the mammoth transportation budget — a mere 0.25 percent of federal transportation spending. But those dollars have been a crucial foundation in building a wide and growing movement.

Deb Hubsmith, director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. Photo: Carolyn Szczepanski

As is the case for so many progressive programs, though, there’s a very real threat that the well of dedicated dollars for Safe Routes to School could dry up in the next transportation bill.  That was apparent from the opening moments of the biennial gathering.

Deb Hubsmith, the director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership and a key player in developing and advancing “Safe Routes” nationwide, appealed to a huge crowd of more than 600 participants for three things: courage, faith and immediate action.

“As you know, we have some challenges,” she said. “Some people might be discouraged by what they’ve heard about Congress and the federal debt. The transportation bill is up for reauthorization and there’s fighting about what will happen with the future. Some say Safe Routes to School is not a federal priority.”

“In the face of this discussion right now, we need to have courage,” she added. “We need to know that some of the best outcomes come from challenges in front of us. When something is at risk it creates an opportunity; do we want to go backwards or have a future with healthy kids and healthy communities.”

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For a brief moment in August of 2007, the country was serious about maintaining its bridge infrastructure. Photo:Construction Law Today

(Marybeth Miceli is the President of Miceli Infrastructure Consulting, LLC.  She is a bridge testing and assessment specialist and materials scientist with a background in Nondestructive Testing/Evaluation.   She has just completed a 3-year term on the Board of Directors for the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT), who named her “Young NDT Professional of the Year” in 2003. She is also married to L.A. Streetsblog editor Damien Newton.)

We can thank President Obama for calling attention once again to the tragic bridge collapse of the I-35 W Bridge outside Minneapolis in 2007.  In a recent speech regarding the Republican spending bill, he criticizes the GOP’s infrastructure spending cuts, tying together the collapse with aging infrastructure and our lack of spending in the transportation arena.  The critics in the media have decided to jump on this, waving the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report saying the 2007 collapse of the I-35 highway bridge just outside of Minneapolis was caused by a design flaw.

Unsurprisingly, some in the media continues to not do their homework, particularly when it comes to transportation infrastructure.  Fox & Friends reported that Obama, in his speech, was blaming the bridge collapse on “budget holdouts.” How many of those reporting on this story (or even those who reported on the original collapse) actually read the report?

The President is 100 percent correct to draw this association between lack of funding and the collapse.  Though the “root cause” of the collapse was the gusset plate design flaw, there were many contributing factors to the collapse such as the construction equipment and materials being placed on the exact weak joint.  But there is so much more to the “perfect storm” that caused the collapse.  If any one of the factors had been avoided, the tragic collapse that took the lives of 13 would likely have been averted.

Cutting funding for transportation infrastructure, inspection, and repair only make it more likely that the conditions that caused this “storm” could happen again.

Two of the main contributing factors were: Read more…

Like everyone else, Safe Routes to School advocates are scaling back. Last year, a bill introduced in the Senate asked for $600 million to enhance pedestrian and bike safety near schools. “We were working in a pretty different environment,” said Margo Pedroso, deputy director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. “Everybody was talking about a $500 billion transportation bill. So we figured, we don’t know what the full bill will be in the end, but let’s go for the funding we feel like we need.”

Kids biking to school in Illinois. Photo courtesy of Safe Routes to School National Partnership.

This week, 12 Democratic Senators introduced a bill to maintain current funding for Safe Routes to School at $183 million and keep it as a standalone program.

Those seem like reasonable goals, but even they will be a haul. The next reauthorization, as we’ve been amply warned, may be even smaller than the last one, given low revenues. And everyone from the administration on down is in favor of consolidating programs, meaning Safe Routes to School would be one piece of a much bigger pie called “Livability.”

It’s also telling that the Partnership couldn’t get a single Republican co-sponsor on the bill. Last time around, they had three. But this time, with everything getting cut, GOP lawmakers were reluctant to “play favorites” and recommend one program for sustained funding. And with the reauthorization process well underway, the Partnership didn’t want to wait any longer to try to attract GOP sponsors. They moved the bill forward with Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) taking the lead.

Safe Routes to School pulls communities together to identify trouble spots that prevent parents from feeling safe letting their kids walk or bike to school. Sometimes it means building or widening a sidewalk. Sometimes parents create “walking school buses,” where an adult accompanies a whole gaggle of kids on their walk. Sometimes it means raising crosswalks or calming traffic or installing flashing School Zone signs. In communities where crime or harassment is the biggest deterrent, SRTS works with police to address personal safety.

In some communities, Pedroso acknowledges, walking to school just isn’t an option. So the new bill allows for 10 percent of SRTS funds to be spent on safe routes to bus stops. “In really, really rural communities where kids live miles and miles from school, they’re not going to be able to walk or bike to school,” said Pedroso. “What they’re often struggling with is safety getting to the bus. And they may be walking on these county roads where there are no shoulders, no lighting, they’re right up against the tree line, and there’s really not a safe place for them.”

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Our local paper recently ran the story of Edith Cameron, killed in a car crash on a road we sometimes use. We anxiously scanned the column looking for that something that one of the drivers involved must have done wrong—the thing that we surely would never do, like hit the road without a seatbelt or after downing a few beers.

It turns out the person driving the car that hit Edith ran a red light. But knowing why Edith died should provide cold comfort: even when we drive with care and precision, cars are far more dangerous machines than we normally give them credit for. Since most Americans use cars with far greater frequency than they use other dangerous equipment, cars put most of us at higher risk of death or maiming than anything else.

Are fancy electronic distractions on dashboards really a good idea? Photo: Redmond Pie

You can engineer cars to be safer, but the safest way to engineer our communities is to make cars less necessary. This is because driving without error is impossible, and the tiniest error made in a car, even one with the latest safety devices, can have devastating consequences.

Until a recent drop in fatal crashes in the US—in good part the result of a recession-induced reduction in vehicle miles driven—the annual death toll had been holding stubbornly at roughly 40,000. Even now, each day about one hundred people die and each year thousands are brain-damaged and wheelchair-bound after being hit by a car, in a car, or both.

Of course, this isn’t to say that many vehicles and roads aren’t safer today, given innovations like air bags and electronic stability control, developments in highway design, and heroic efforts to put an end to driving under the influence.

Still, individually we may not be much safer. For one thing, people tend to take more risks, like speeding and texting, when made more confident by better-braking cars and newly-widened roads. And much of the risk reduction these improvements provide is erased if we drive more miles, something likely as the economy rebounds. Besides, safety technology has just barely kept pace with technology that provides yet more distractions. (This year’s offering? A front seat infotainment system that can find movie listings, tag songs, hold your restaurant table, and provide a hot spot for five laptops).

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If you left your grandma’s old wicker chair out on the porch all winter – and the next, and the next, and the next for 20 years – would you still trust that chair to hold you if you sat down?

A quarter of U.S. bridges may be deficient, but focusing on just the most dangerous will have the most impact. Image: Partnership Border Study

According to Barry LePatner, author of the new book Too Big to Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward, you shouldn’t trust our country’s bridges much more than you trust that chair. He calls them “ticking time bombs” and “tragedies waiting to happen.”

But, he says, there’s good news. You’ve heard the estimates that a quarter of the nation’s bridges are either “structurally deficient” or “functionally obsolete.” That’s more than 160,000 bridges to repair or replace. But rather than throw up our hands and say the problem is too big, LePatner urges us to take a look at a much more significant – and manageable – number: 7,980.

“Forget ‘structurally deficient.’ Forget ‘functionally obsolete,’” LePatner told a group of experts in Washington, DC last week. He urges a new focus on bridges he calls “fracture-critical.”

“A ‘fracture-critical’ bridge is a bridge designed where if one critical member of the bridge fails – one piece –the entire bridge goes down like a house of cards,” he said, “It has no redundancy.”

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Motor vehicle crashes caused 28 percent of all deaths among people 24 and under in the United States in 2006. In 2009, nearly 34,000 people died on America’s roads, and that was considered a big improvement over previous years. More and more, it seems, Americans are wondering why our country is so far behind on creating safe transportation systems.

Better management and enforcement aren't the only ways to reduce traffic deaths. Image: Car Insurance Tips

According to a new report, Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations, by the nongovernmental National Research Council:

Nearly every high-income country is reducing annual traffic fatalities and fatality rates faster than is the United States, and several countries where fatality rates per kilometer of travel were substantially higher than in the United States 15 years ago are now below the U.S. rate.

The report authors acknowledge that high-achieving countries attribute their own progress, in part, to road design, but that doesn’t make it into their own set of recommendations, which focus on management reforms, enforcement, and the building of political and public support for those changes.

Barbara McCann, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, says that’s not enough. With current road design, she said, “the priority is put on speed and volume of travel, and that results in more deaths than if there were a higher priority put on safety in the actual road design.”

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Last Wednesday in Brooklyn, the driver of a private garbage truck ignored a bicyclist riding alongside and crushed him as the truck rounded a corner, according to a preliminary NYPD investigation. Police identified the victim as Eling Rivera, 51, of East New York.

Photo: So Cal Metro/Flickr

No definitive count is available, but Rivera’s death could well be the hundredth in which a garbage truck ran over a New York City pedestrian or cyclist over the past decade-and-a-half. Twenty-six such fatalities were recorded during a four-year period in the mid-1990s, a rate that equates to between six and seven per year, according to research I directed for Right Of Way in our 1999 report, Killed By Automobile [PDF, see pages 33-34].

With an average of 23.8 peds or cyclists killed per hundred million miles driven, garbage trucks had by far the highest fatality rate in the study, exceeding the all-vehicle average of 1.7 killed per hundred million miles by a factor of 14. Within the garbage truck category, the per-mile rate of killing pedestrians and cyclists was two-thirds higher for private haulers than for NYC Department of Sanitation trucks.

Six hours before Rivera was killed, operators of a Philadelphia garbage barge ignored a radio distress call from a stalled “duck boat” and rammed it, killing two tourists and sending 30 more into the Delaware River, the National Transportation Safety Board revealed yesterday.

Investigators from the NTSB, the federal agency chartered with determining causes of transportation accidents and formulating recommendations to improve transportation safety, are combing the Delaware River for clues in the duck boat-barge smashup. Yet none can be seen in Bushwick, just as no NTSB personnel have looked into any of the 100 or so other garbage truck-related pedestrian and cyclist fatalities dating to the mid-nineties.

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In the latest in a series of high-profile conservative moves, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's (R) administration has announced it will stop using cameras to enforce speed limits on the state's highways -- ending a program once billed as a boon to road safety that would also help raise revenue.

A speed-camera image of the car belonging to Thomas Destories, accused last year of killing a speed camera worker. (Photo: Phx. New Times)

The end of the speed-limit enforcement program, first reported by the Arizona Republic, came after months of stinging criticism from conservative groups that viewed the cameras as an violation of drivers' rights. Arizona drivers also have mounted their own rebellions against the speed cameras, with one donning a monkey mask to escape liability and others blocking the lenses with Silly String, Post-Its, or other items.

The cameras are programmed to only notice drivers who exceed posted speed limits by more than 10 miles per hour, with some geared to monitor red-light infractions and illegal turns. The fines for violators exceed $150, although the Department of Public Safety canceled any ticket that was not hand-delivered to drivers within 120 days.

Brewer's Democratic predecessor as governor, now-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, started the enforcement camera program in 2008. Napolitano touted its road safety benefits in explaining her move, describing the state's dwindling coffers as a secondary concern.

"[T]he plain fact of the matter is from a public safety perspective, that the photo radar has proven to be a technology that actually helps road safety and we would have proposed this irrespective of the downturn in revenue numbers," she told the AP at the time.

But the notion that the cameras were employed first and foremost as a money-maker for the state proved enduring. As the Republic reported yesterday:

Democrats are moving quickly on their plan to take a unified approach to auto safety reforms in the aftermath of the Toyota recalls, with Senate Commerce Committee members releasing a new bill today that would quintuple the maximum existing penalties for carmakers who -- like Toyota -- fail to promptly notify the public of defective products.

The Commerce panel's bill, released today by panel chairman Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) office, also would authorize $300 million in additional funding over the next three years for auto safety enforcement and provide whistleblower protections to car industry employees who notify the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of possible safety risks.

The lifting of existing caps on per-vehicle penalties is likely to please safety advocates such as Joan Claybrook of Public Citizen, who have called for much higher penalties for automakers found to be in violation of NHTSA standards. Toyota has agreed to a record-high $16.4 million fine for its slow response to the widespread defects found in its gas pedals but did not acknowledge any improper actions.

In addition to the Commerce panel's release today -- check out a full summary of the bill after the jump -- the House Energy & Commerce Committee is planning a Thursday hearing on auto safety issues.