Episode 33: Conversation with Harry Adler (Making Trucking Safer in the United States)

Harry Adler:

These families, these survivors who constantly revisit their grief and their trauma also help in this effort to make trucking safer, they empower me to do what I do every day. They give me the fuel to keep going and keep working in this space, to be able to push certain policies and goals that we’re working towards across the finish line so that other families don’t have to join this club.

David Craig – Host:

I’m attorney Dave Craig, managing partner and one of the founders of the law firm of Craig, Kelley & Faultless. I’ve represented people who have been seriously injured or who have had a family member killed in a semi or other big truck wreck for over 30 years. Following the wrecks, their lives are chaos.

Often, they don’t even know enough about the process to ask the right questions. It is my goal to empower you by providing you with the information you need to protect yourself and your family. In each and every episode, I will interview top experts and professionals that are involved in truck wreck cases. This is After the Crash.

Today, we have Harry Adler as a guest. Harry is a co-chair and principal of the Institute for Safer Trucking. Harry has a strong background and committed to truck safety, big truck safety. He’s worked with safety advocates. He’s educated in this area. He’s worked with lawmakers, he’s worked with victims of semi and other big truck wrecks, and he’s worked hard and diligently to try to make things safer for the public.

Before founding his current place of Institute for Safer Trucking, he worked for the Truck Safety Coalition in different roles, including, I believe, executive director towards the end. He’s dedicated his work life to making the roads safer for all of us. Harry, first of all, thank you for what you do. It is extraordinarily important. We want to talk about it in a little bit more detail but thank you for what you do and thank you for being a guest.

Harry Adler:

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. I’m looking forward to just talking about the Institute for Safer Trucking, but in a more general sense, ways we can make trucking safer. I think there’s a lot of solutions that exist right before us that folks aren’t aware of.

That’s part of what we want to do at the Institute for Safer Trucking. It’s really what I wanted to do throughout my career is just to educate people about these solutions.

David Craig – Host:

Tell us a little bit, how did you get into this area? Because I know you’ve been working for a long time at this, so tell us a little bit of why you’re doing it and how you got into it.

Harry Adler:

Yeah. I definitely think if I were to take a time machine back and meet myself in college and say, “Here’s what I’m doing,” I’d be pretty shocked I fell into this. While I was in college, I went to school in DC and I did all the internships that I could. I worked for a member of Congress. I was a personal assistant for a federal district court judge, and worked in the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General’s office.

What I had come to realize was that I really wanted to do work outside of the government, but government adjacent. I started to look for different places and I always knew that as part of that, the organization’s mission should be to help people who need to be helped.

I came upon two different nonprofits. One was focused on drunk driving prevention and education around that. The other was focused on trying to make trucking safer and working with folks who had been adversely affected by truck crashes. Prior to that, I had never really thought about truck safety outside of those moments on the highway where you’re driving alongside a semi-truck and you say, “I do not want this thing moving into my lane.”

I ended up taking the job at the nonprofit that focused on making trucking safer, and worked there while I got my master’s in public administration and then eventually became their executive director. Then in March 2020, me and my colleagues, we started the Institute for Safer Trucking. We did so with the goal of having three central pillars.

One is to help people who have been adversely affected by large truck crashes, the families of victims, survivors, get them access to resources in whatever way we can. The second is to educate the public about data-driven solutions to making trucking safer, things that can reduce crashes, prevent injuries, save lives.

That can be everything from technologies we could be building into the trucks to policies we could implement to make drivers safer, whether it’s from the hiring process to the training process, throughout their career, and then ways we can make the industry as a whole safer.

I think there are things that pervade every sense of the industry, and those can be the ways we pay truck drivers, their treatment, and the hours they work. Those are more industry-wide goals that we could work towards to make the industry safer, but really that’s how, I guess to sum it up shortly, how I fell into this space.

I’ve been doing it now eight years. I have met with hundreds of families and survivors, and it is never easy to hear these stories, but I will say that when folks ask, “Is this draining?” I say, “No. It’s on the contrary.” These families, these survivors who constantly revisit their grief and their trauma to also help in this effort to make trucking safer, they empower me to do what I do every day.

They give me the fuel to keep going and keep working in this space, to be able to push certain policies and goals that we’re working towards across the finish line so that other families don’t have to join this club.

David Craig – Host:

Well, I agree. I mean, I represent the victims of large truck wrecks. If that doesn’t get you up in the morning, then I don’t know what would. I mean when you have these people and they entrust you with their lives and trying to make, you’re never going to put things back the way they were, but you’re going to make things as good as possible.

I tell you what. I keep the pictures of my clients on my desk and that gets you up. I mean, it’s a worthwhile process. Sometimes defense lawyers will tell me, “Well, they don’t want to go through a trial because of the trauma and the emotions. I’m like, “You don’t understand what these folks have been through. A trial is nothing compared to what your driver put my clients through.”

I really understand that. I think that anybody that does this for a living does. Again, I really appreciate the fact that my goal here with this podcast is to educate the general public because unless you happen to be a victim or unless you are somebody like yourself, or a lawyer who works in this area you did before eight years ago, you don’t realize the dangers that are out there.

You’re traveling on the highway, going on vacation and you don’t realize how dangerous it is. I know the Institute for Safer Trucking does a lot to do those things that you just talked about, but maybe you can give us a little bit more detail. How do you go about education? How do you go about changing? How do you do those type of things?

Before we get into specifics, just generally, I mean, what do you guys do, because you have been very successful.

Harry Adler:

Yeah. I think the main thing we do is make it easy for the public to approach this issue. I think that goes to your earlier point that unfortunately it’s not until it’s a little too late for most people that they enter into the world of truck safety. What we’re trying to do is tell people that they should be a part of this space before it’s too late, before the crash.

That’s the way that we are trying to engage the public to let them know about statistics that are coming out because with all the news that’s happening and how quick the news cycles happen, the likelihood that the most recent trench of data on truck crash fatalities, that it percolates to the top of national news, we recognize that that’s not going to be the case.

The role that we play is helping amplify that information when it comes out and making it easy for people to understand. If you actually saw the data set for all of the fatal crashes that happen in the United States in a given year, it’s wildly expansive. There are many different data sets within it and how you have to put them together and look for integrity is incredibly complicated.

Right then and there, it’s not easy for the public to understand what’s happening with truck crashes, how much worse they’re getting. We go through and we make sure that data is easy for them to consume. We’ll go through and see, “Alright. In the last year for available data, 5,788 people were killed in large truck crashes. That’s out of roughly 40,000 people killed in all crashes.”

Right now, we’re trying to give people a perspective of, “Okay. There’s a good portion of people who are dying in traffic crashes, and then of that, a good portion are dying in crashes involving a large truck.” What does that mean for someone who’s new to this issue? Well, we could tell them, if you go back 10 years, that’s a 47% increase in the number of people killed in large truck crashes.

Now, they don’t just know the most current data, they now know that the problem’s also gotten worse by a substantial measure. Right then and there, we’ve taken two pieces of data that really might mean nothing to them, drawn a relation and shown why it matters to them. We can take it a step further and say, “In your state, in Texas, there’s now over 800 people killed in large truck crashes.”

When you go back and look at the number of people killed, that’s a substantial increase. Ten years ago, there were around 500 people killed. Things are getting worse in your state. We try and use the data to make people feel as though the issue relates to them because the fact of the matter is it does. People being killed, trucks crashing, that affects them.

David Craig – Host:

Yeah. I think knowledge is power. Without the knowledge, you’d have no idea how bad the issue is. I mean, so what you’re saying is it’s getting worse rather than better. It’s getting less safe, and it’s more dangerous to share the roads with big trucks than it has been.

Harry Adler:

Unfortunately, when you look at the situation for truck crash deaths, the amount that they have been increasing is far outpacing the amount of … the increase in truck vehicle miles traveled. What that tells us is it’s getting deadlier. It’s not as though there was a 20% increase in the amount of miles the trucks were traveling, and then there was also a 20% increase in deaths.

That would mean that the rate is staying the same, but it’s not the case. The rate’s getting worse, and injuries are getting worse. We’re seeing when we start to look at, isolate certain factors, whether the truck driver is speeding or if there is distraction, those are getting worse. It’s hard to understand that when you see certain companies voluntarily implement certain safety technologies or safety management and driver training policies.

What that tells you is that the bad actors in this industry are getting worse at a faster rate than the good guys are improving. That’s the problem. When we are talking about bad actors in the trucking industry, we recognize that not everyone in the trucking industry is bad.

In fact, there are a substantial amount of companies that are really going out there and doing their best to safely haul goods. We also know there are companies that are using speed to gain a competitive advantage that are coercing their drivers to go further despite the fact that they might be fatigued.

These are the companies that we want to identify and then ultimately remove from the trucking industry. Then, we want to help empower and highlight those companies that are doing well. If they are successful in using a suite of safety technologies like automatic emergency braking and speed limiters and lane departure warning, well then, they should be commended for those efforts if it’s reduced their crashes, their injury involvement, and their number of fatal crashes.

That’s how our organization likes to approach the issue of safety. That is, if anyone takes anything away, we have a problem where the bad guys are getting worse at a faster rate than the good guys are getting better.

David Craig – Host:

I know you mentioned a couple of the areas, but maybe let’s talk about some of the areas that you’re focusing on that would help make the road safer. I think you mentioned auto emergency braking. Maybe you can explain what that is and how that would have an impact.

Harry Adler:

Automatic emergency braking is an incredibly beneficial safety technology. It works by, first, alerting a driver with either audio or visual alarms to an impending obstacle, whether that obstacle is moving or stationary. Then, if the driver fails to respond to those alerts, the brakes are automatically applied.

This technology, when it works correctly from that time of the first alarm to impact, you can, at a minimum, cut your impact speed. What this technology can do is it can either prevent or crash altogether if it brings the vehicle to a halt before impact or alternatively, it can minimize the velocity at time of impact. That can make a real difference.

We know that the survivability of a crash at 70 miles an hour, especially when the striking vehicle is an 80,000-pound big rig, is substantially lower than if that impacts speed were at 35 miles an hour. It is a technology that addresses factors that we have been working for decades to address, fatigue and impairment and distraction.

If you have a driver that is impaired or fatigued and starts to fall asleep, this technology could be the difference between them slamming into a row of stopped cars versus a much more minor collision where it’s a two-vehicle impact and everyone walks away.

David Craig – Host:

I mean, I’ve been doing this for over 35 years, and I can’t remember a year where I didn’t get hired by a family who has lost a loved one in a construction zone where traffic was stopped or slowing and they got rear-ended by a semi that did not have that technology. They were either distracted, they fell asleep, or like you said, were impaired.

That technology could have made the wreck so much less significant, but every year from just one lawyer in Indiana and the Midwest, I see every year families losing loved ones because semis are plowing into the back end, oftentimes with cruise control set. I mean the semis are traveling, as long as nobody stops or slows in front of them, they’re staying on their course, but when they come up on a construction zone, then if they’re not paying attention, it’s deadly.

Harry Adler:

Yeah. I think the data supports your anecdote in a sense. When you look at fatal work zone crashes in this country, one out of every three fatal work zone crashes involve a large truck. That’s a huge overrepresentation. Trucks make up about 4% to 5% of the vehicles. They make up anywhere from 9% to 12% of total vehicle miles traveled.

To consider that they’re involved in one out of every three fatal work zone crashes, I mean, it tells you something. That is, again, something that could be addressed by automatic emergency braking. Our organization has been really leading the way on this technology. We have been educating people since our inception about its benefits and we’re happy that in the infrastructure bill that ultimately became law, language to require automatic emergency braking on class seven and eight trucks was included.

Our organization really helped educate a lot of the offices. We also helped engage the industry to talk about how everyone could get behind language that would require this technology. Being able to bring together various stakeholders to educate lawmakers and policymakers about the benefits, this is something that we’re able to do as an organization.

I think what made us, as impactful as it was, we also empower families who lost loved ones, survivors to tell their stories, in particular when it is a crash that involves a factor that could have been addressed by automatic emergency braking. Having families come in, advocates come in and say, “I really think we should have automatic emergency braking. It would’ve played a role in preventing my family’s crash, and while I can’t bring them back, I don’t want another family to have to go through what I’ve gone through.”

This is a really powerful message. It’s something that it’s hard to understand despite even doing this for eight years that these people have this strength to revisit this grief, this trauma to share their story so that other people don’t have to endure what they’re going through. That’s an incredibly powerful thing.

It’s one of the reasons why moving forward, our country is going to have trucks that have automatic emergency braking. This will save lives. There is no doubt about that. The true extent of the lifesaving potential remains to be seen, but I will tell you that based on what we know on the data that distraction and fatigue crashes are undercounted. This will have a huge impact on safety.

David Craig – Host:

Yeah. That’s fantastic. It’s a great change and I appreciate everything you and your organization did to help bring that about. Another area that I know you guys focus on, and I know you were actually appointed on an advisory committee for underride protection, and so I think that’s fantastic. Congratulations on that appointment.

Harry Adler:

Thank you.

David Craig – Host:

Maybe you can tell a little bit about that and explain to folks what underride guards are. Some people probably know it, some people probably don’t. How can we make things safer?

Harry Adler:

Yeah. Well, yeah, thank you for that. We have the first meeting of the advisory committee at the end of the month. I’m definitely looking forward to that, but for folks who are not sure what an underride crash is, it’s a type of collision where a passenger vehicle or a vulnerable road user, like a bicyclist or a pedestrian travels underneath the trailer of a truck and it can happen in the rear, it can happen in the side.

Then, in instances where a truck actually goes on top of and over a car, that’s called an override crash, a front override crash, but underride crashes are incredibly deadly. For vulnerable road users, it’s quite clear why. It exposes the bicyclist or pedestrian to the wheels of the truck. For a passenger vehicle, it’s incredibly deadly because generally the initial point of impact between the passenger vehicle and the trailer is at the windshield.

It bypasses the hood, which includes a crumple zone. It’s generally where some airbag deployment sensors are. When the part of the trailer, the rigid trailer hits into the windshield, it can result in passenger compartment intrusion, whereas that entails, the trailer goes into the passenger compartment and it results in serious head and neck injury, oftentimes fatal injury to the passengers.

When you see these crashes, it can make the car look unrecognizable. These crashes can result in the top of the car being shorn off. They’re incredibly deadly because, again, a lot of those safety features we build into a car crumple zone, airbag deployment sensors, they’re bypassed. The person inside or the persons inside the vehicle are exposed to great harm.

They are preventable though. We could prevent these crashes from happening if we had guards or protection devices on the rear end and the sides of trucks. A lot of trucks in this country are required to have a rear guard. That’ll be that bar that sticks down. If you’ve ever been behind a truck and you see that bar that sticks down, sometimes it’s striped red and white those are rear underride guards.

The standard for them was recently updated as part of the Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act. We helped with that measure just to help see where we could strengthen that standard, but I would contend that it’s still not as strong as it could be. Right now, the new standard will require rear guards to prevent a passenger vehicle from traveling underneath a truck trailer at speeds of up to 35 miles an hour.

That could be improved because we know that there are guards that could prevent at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour that are commercially available. To stop at 35, I think, is unwise. I think there’s more potential in terms of preventing high speed collisions into the rear.

David Craig – Host:

Well, and I know, I mean, again, you look at the underride guards, what most of us are familiar with the rear underride guards, if you’ve ever been behind a semi, I think I tried one of these cases over 20 years ago over in Missouri, over by Kansas City. At that time, that was the technology, and they hadn’t improved that as much. We were able to show, and we actually built the truck in the courtroom and showed the jury what the difference was and the different options they had.

Even back then, they had different options that would’ve made it safer, but certainly, we have seen some improvement in the rear guards, which is not satisfactory, but some. But we’ve seen nothing, at least on the semis, when we pass semis on the highway, we see nothing on the sides.

Harry Adler:

Yeah.

David Craig – Host:

Why is that and is there something that can be done about that?

Harry Adler:

Yeah. Also, as part of the infrastructure bill, the Department of Transportation is required to look into sideguards, their feasibility, their benefits. We’re awaiting that study. One of the things, as member of the advisory committee for underride protection, I’m hopeful that the study is one of the things that the advisory committee is able to look at before it’s finalized and published.

I mean, I think that’s exactly what the function of a committee is supposed to be. The advisory committees are generally set up in the federal government to either focus on a particular issue or to assist an agency. In this instance, there’s an advisory committee to advise the Department of Transportation on matters pertaining to underrides.

On various stakeholders on the committee, there are people from industry, the trailer manufacturers, families of victims and survivors, safety groups, which is what I’m representing. I think there’s also some law enforcement. It is a mix of various interests. The hope is that we can collaborate to provide recommendations to the federal government.

One of the recommendations that I think I’ll be promoting is that we do need sideguards. We need to move forward with it quickly. Side, underride protection or sideguards would address a lot of these crashes where the passenger vehicle is colliding into the side and whether it is a perpendicular crash where the trailer is like this and the vehicle hits at a 90-degree angle or even a glancing blow.

Then also these guards would and should offer protection to vulnerable road users, in particular bicyclists who in cities when making right turns are highly susceptible to this kind of crash because what happens is the truck has low speed off tracking. The first set of axles travels one path and then that rear most set of axles travels a tighter, smaller path.

The bicyclist, if they happen to be in that space, could be pulled under and likely killed. We think that sideguards are a must in terms of improving safety because really, we’ve known about this issue, the ability for vehicles, people, bicyclists to travel under a truck for decades. The fact that we have not addressed it is ludicrous. We know that there are technologies out there and available today that would serve as a sideguard that could prevent a crash at speeds of up to 35 miles an hour.

I’ve actually been present at every single big underride crash test that’s happened over the last, I think going back six, seven years. When we were at our previous organization, John Lennon and I helped put those crash tests together, these round tables for underride. We were able to see the difference between a car hitting a rear guard that was of a higher standard versus the old standard.

We were able to see a vehicle hit into a truck with a sideguard and one without one. Those videos are available online. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has them. They’re incredibly impactful. I cannot tell you how impactful they can be when you’re talking to a particular office or a policymaker and you say, “This is the difference between a truck that has this technology we’re advocating for and a truck that doesn’t.”

Then to be able to tell them that crash dummy, that was in the crash that didn’t have a sideguard, that guy dies. The other person, they walk away with a sprained wrist. That’s the difference. It is life and death. I think when you can first get people to understand what that kind of crash is and then see the benefits of the solution that we’re presenting, it’s really hard for them to say, “I don’t think it’s a great idea.”

David Craig – Host:

Well, hopefully educating people will help. Again, I’ve seen the videos and they’re very impactful. I mean, when you see the difference that a sideguard rail can make, and I would encourage everybody else to take a look at that because it definitely, again, educating yourself. I would imagine that the opposition is mainly a cost argument?

Harry Adler:

Yeah. For the most part. It’s mostly cost, but I think that issue is that it depends on whether or not someone is advocating for a retrofit requirement. A retrofit requirement is just as it sounds, do you go back and put this technology on the trailers that already exist on the roads?

From a practical perspective, it’s a hard argument to make because ultimately regulations in this country need to go through a cost-benefit analysis. The benefits of doing this in terms of lives saved and injuries reduced need to outweigh the costs. If you do a retrofit based on what they deem the benefit, it’s not beneficial.

Now, there’s a couple things to unpack with that. For one, we recognize and also the government recognizes that there is an undercount of the number of people killed in underride crashes. Right then and there, when you have an undercount in the number of people killed, it diminishes the benefit you could calculate.

Because if they say it’s 250 people who are killed in underride crashes and the actual number is closer to 800 or 900, well, when you’re trying to calculate the amount of lives you could save, you start to recognize that you’re working from a much smaller pool. The benefits diminished. That skews the cost-benefit analysis.

When you start to look at what is the cost of an aftermarket product and then having it put on, there are just built in costs to that. Someone does have to take a truck off the road and go to someone to get it affixed. Right then and there, that versus the truck manufacturer.  I’ve seen trailers and the trucks be built from start to finish. The way in which they’re manufacturing them, adding on the sideguard would be akin to how they could add on the rear guard.

It wouldn’t have to be an aftermarket product. You would take out the time requirement and at some point, it would be hard for them to argue, this takes us an additional two or three hours to add this on. It’s like, “Does it really? You’re not taking it to a different facility. You’re just adding it into the assembly line.”

Going through the cost-benefit analysis, but we’re having a requirement for sideguards. If you said to the manufacturers, “You guys need to move forward and make your trucks and make your trailers with these guards,” they would find a way to do so in a cost-beneficial way for them. At some point, when it becomes a requirement, we see this a lot with mandates, the costs of that unit start to come down dramatically.

The cost arguments I don’t think really hold too much water unless you go the route of like, “We’re going to do a retrofit and have an aftermarket. For us, we focus on this should be required on the new trailers. Let’s start there. We’re not going to hold up going forward with a rulemaking to try and get everything all at once. Whereas if we could get new trucks, that would be a huge start.

That’s it for sideguards. That’s what you’d want as a requirement. Get it on new trucks. That’s what we’re hoping the study turns into once the study comes out for them to say, “All right. Now we’re moving forward so that this would be a requirement.”

David Craig – Host:

Let’s talk a little bit about shift gears a little bit and talk about speed limiters. What is a speed limiter and what role would they play in making the road safer?

Harry Adler:

Yeah. Speed limiters are a technology, as their name denotes, that caps the top end speed of a vehicle. They exist in every large truck that’s been manufactured since about 2003 in this country. They work by functioning in the engine control unit or engine control module. In some, they basically will say, “We’re going to limit the amount of fuel so you can only go this fast.”

By doing that, trucking companies can obviously get fuel savings and save money on how much they’re spending on gas, but they also reduce maintenance to their vehicles. The tires last longer, the brakes are better, but most importantly, they reduce their involvement in high-speed crashes.

They have been used by leading trucking companies for 10 to 20 years now. These arguments that we oftentimes hear about speed limiters, there are folks who are opposed to them because they want to use speed as a competitive advantage. There are companies that will say, “Speed limiters make your crashes go up actually,” or “Speed limiters create a speed differential and that causes more crashes.”

Again, we always say, “You don’t need to go on supposing what speed limiters are going to do. We just look at the companies that have used them.” These are leading companies that have maintained profitability. We know it’s not hurting business. These are companies that operate in almost every state. They’re not turning their speed limiters off when they’re in states that have higher speed limits.

Their trucks that are set at 70 miles an hour are traveling at that speed through Texas in the same way that they’re traveling through a state that doesn’t have an 85 mile an hour speed limit. When that truck gets to 65, despite the fact that they can go 70, they should be going 65.

This idea that you set a speed limiter and it’s going to cause your trucks to be involved in more crashes, especially if there’s a speed differential, it just doesn’t hold water because again, these companies would’ve reversed course. If it really caused a crash, the fact that the speed limiter was set that’s what caused the crash, I haven’t heard of a single trucking company being sued for setting a speed limiter.

None of it really is backed up by the real-world use of this technology. We can point to studies that show a truck that’s using its speed limiter compared to one that isn’t is involved in half of the high-speed collisions, sure, we could point to that, but I actually think an even more powerful argument is just looking at all of these companies that have done it and the fact that really none of them have reversed course.

Maybe a company here or there has said, “Okay. We’re going to go from 68 to 70,” but what they didn’t do is say, “We’re going to take speed limiters off our trucks or we’re not going to set them.” That’s what we point to people as technology that exists. It’s being used by a large swath of the trucking industry already. The only real argument against it is to basically say, “Yes. Speeding can be the cost of doing business.”

That can’t be a sound argument that people really want to support. I should be able to speed. No. You shouldn’t. Driving isn’t a right. It’s a privilege. We all share the roads. We have posted speed limits, but when we consider the fact that you’re driving a vehicle professionally that could weigh 80,000 pounds in some states, unfortunately it could weigh even more than that, no, you shouldn’t be going 80.

I don’t care what the posted speed limit is, that is demonstrably unsafe. Also, when you really dig into it, I mean most truck tires aren’t even rated for that speed. Most of them I think cap out at 75 miles an hour. That’s assuming we’re in good weather conditions. For a variety of reasons, you shouldn’t be going that speed, but that’s why speed limiters are an effective tool.

They’re already there. There’s really no cost. To set these, I mean you can go on YouTube and watch a video for any of the trucks that you have, it’s a matter of 5 or 10 minutes setting the speed limiter to the speed you want. It’s not even a time concern.

David Craig – Host:

Are high speed wrecks, is that a factor? I mean, is that a problem with semis? Are they more deadly? I assume they are, but I assume that the trucks that are going too fast are creating dangers.

Harry Adler:

Yeah. These high-speed crashes, I mean these are a lot of those crashes that you will see garner some national attention because the truck is at that speed, it’s almost like a small bomb. I mean, you have an 80,000-pound truck that impacts at 70, 75 miles an hour. I mean, the other vehicles that are impacted could be unrecognizable.

These are the crashes where you also see there’s no brakes applied. It’s sometimes a combination. It’s the guy’s speeding and he’s distracted. We just worked with this incredible woman out of North Carolina and her son was killed in a crash where guy’s going 70 miles an hour, doesn’t hit the brakes, her son is killed, another person was killed, I believe another person was injured.

For what? So that this guy could try and get somewhere a little quicker, a little faster. We think that speed limiters will help immensely in these top end speeds that have very low survivability for anyone else who’s in the path of this speeding 80,000-pound vehicle.

David Craig – Host:

You touched on it just in that answer is that for the distracted driver and certainly over my career, I’m seeing distracted driving continue to increase dramatically. Actually, I mean it’s not even close. I see more distracted driver wrecks involving semis and large trucks than I do impaired drivers.

I mean there was a period of time where I was seeing a lot of impaired drivers and I still unfortunately see some, but I’m seeing distracted driving wrecks frequently where the people are using their cell phones for GPS and they’re holding and looking at it and then they run into my clients and then they’ve killed them. I’ve seen cases where people are using laptop. I mean all kinds of things that it’s not just texting and driving and it’s all kinds of use of technology.

Sometimes unfortunately, it’s a variety of things in that tractor. I went out to Montana, took my lawyers out there so we could drive semis. I took all my attorneys out, we drove semis, we actually rode in semis on the highway. I can tell you it’s a demanding job. I mean to watch the traffic, to watch what’s going on around you, that is a full-time, very intense job to be a professional truck driver and you cannot afford to be distracted.

Are you seeing an increase in distracted driving wrecks on these big rigs?

Harry Adler:

Yeah. Distraction is definitely one of the areas that we’re looking at. Again, I will preface what I’m going to say next with the fact that there is just an undercount in the amount of distracted truck drivers. Again, that can happen because unless we have in-cab video, it could be hard to actually determine if they were distracted. We think in-cab cameras are a really beneficial tool in that regard.

Also, if you have a truck driver who is involved in a two-vehicle crash, a fatal two-vehicle crash, 97% of the time it’s the person in the passenger vehicle who dies. They have the ability as a sole survivor to say, “This is what happened.” Absent someone finding a witness, and I’m sure you’ve seen this in your case, their story is the one that’s believed. That’s the one that’s included in the police accident report.

That’s the one that you all, in helping your clients, might have to disprove. This is a huge problem when we’re looking at the numbers and we say, “Wow. Right now, we see that in 2021, the last year for available data, 1 out of 10 fatal truck crashes involved distraction. Now, I contend the figures are probably higher because, again, are we actually really accurately capturing the instances of distraction?

That can also involve distraction on the passenger vehicles. I’m not discounting that, but we’re focused here on the truck driver. What we are seeing is for truck drivers from 2012 to 2021, over a 10-year period, there was a 29% increase in the number of distracted truck drivers that were involved in fatal crashes.

Yes. We’re seeing the numbers go up in terms of there are more truck drivers that are involved in distracted crashes. Again, that increase might be much higher because we’re not getting a true picture of all the instances where a truck driver is actually distracted.

David Craig – Host:

I see that. I mean, you’re absolutely right. I mean, the truck driver very rarely admits that they’re distracted, and they tend to blame the four-wheel vehicle, but we’ll have to go through the process of looking for witnesses but also doing downloads of the cell phones. If the distraction is from a cell phone, then sometimes we can figure that out.

It’s frustrating for my clients. I can think of two cases just off the top of my head. One where a flatbed truck was looking at his GPS and he runs into the rear of my client at a stoplight and kills her. I have another one where it kills a man, and the person was using their cell phone and texting. On both of those, we went to the authorities after we did the downloads, and the prosecution and police did nothing.

These families lost their loved ones because of distracted driving. In neither one of those cases was it reported as distracted driving. Both of those cases, if you looked at the police report, they would say, “The car in front of them stopped suddenly,” which it didn’t or that he looked up and all the sudden or that he was looking around and then he couldn’t stop in time before the vehicle that was stopped at the stoplight.

None of them said that they were using their cell phone, they were using technology that they were distracted from that. I’m sure that there’s got to be a higher incidence of distracted driving than what we see. It’s getting scary because, again, there’s so much stuff inside the truck, the cab, the tractor, but in addition, people are bringing stuff in there that’s causing distraction.

I had a case where a truck driver was looking at porn while he was driving and rear-ended my client. My client was just stopped making a left-hand turn and he was texting naked pictures back and forth and he didn’t say that to the police. He said, “My client stopped suddenly in front of him.”

It wasn’t until we did the downloads that we were able to find out, not only that was texting that we found out what he was texting, which was porn. We’re seeing it. People just don’t realize how dangerous it is.

Harry Adler:

Yeah. I mean cell phones are just a huge distraction, but yeah, I think there are ways that it’ll be addressed, in part, I think by automatic emergency braking. Again, I think it’s being able to look at an issue and say, “Are there multi-prongs to this approach?” I think in the instance of the distraction there is, we can have automatic emergency braking, but I also think it’s really important for us to have something like dual facing cameras.

Cameras that both face out of the vehicle, but also ones that face inward. They can be a really effective tool for a trucking company to be able to say, “Okay, our driver was distracted. We should probably address that.” It can be an effective training tool.

You can bring a driver in, and you say, “John, thanks for coming in. We wanted to talk about these hard brakes you were having, and we wanted to show you here what’s happening just roughly a couple seconds before these hard brakes and we’ve started to see a pattern. You’re looking down for your soda. Maybe wait until you’re at a stop to take a sip.”

Eventually, this might not just be a hard brake, it might be you look down for a second. For whatever reason, the car in front of you was closer than you thought and now you’ve hit into them. It can be a training tool. It can be a preventability tool. We think they’re a really powerful thing, the driver facing cameras, but they’ll also help capture instances of distraction.

Really some of the more advanced ones, I mean, can go really far. It’s not just a video capture of you engaging in a distracted behavior. It’ll in fact track your eyes. Some of these ones that are more advanced, I mean they could see like, “All right. He looks like he’s looking forward at the road, but now my eyes are looking down.” In just like a grainy camera, it might not look like I’m looking down, but on that they would track my eyes, or they could see your eyes are starting to do this, you look like you might be falling asleep.

It’s a really powerful tool, but we think that’ll also help address these issues of distraction where the guy is trying to say, “Hey, this is what I was doing right before the crash.” Instead, an officer can say, “Well, I’m just going to look.”

David Craig – Host:

Well, yeah, hopefully that we’ll continue to make improvements instead of going backwards, which is what I find us doing right now in some of these areas, but thank you for everything you do, and what your organization does. How do people find the Institute for Safer Trucking because there’s people out there that may want to help bring about change.

There may be lawyers who are listening to this, and families that have victims. Because one of the things that you’ve said repeatedly is that the victims are helping you change the law and making it …

Harry Adler:

Yeah.

David Craig – Host:

… safer for the rest of us. How do we find you and how do we help?

Harry Adler:

Yeah. You can find our website. We’re also on social media, but safertrucking.org. You can contact us by phone, through our contact form, by email. Yeah, if you are an attorney that’s listening and you’ve worked with survivors or families, please connect them with us. We have online memorial pages that we work with these families to create, to give people a sense of who they were, what happened in the crash, and what is life after the crash.

These memorial pages can be personalized, have pictures and videos. We want to help you, one, just remember your loved one or share your story if you’re a survivor. Then at a more involved level, we have roughly every quarter we have folks come into Washington, DC where we do a mix of educational sessions where people can learn more about these issues of speed limiters and minimum insurance and automatic emergency braking, how to effectively share their story.

Also, to meet up with other people who are like them, who have lost loved ones, who have survived truck crashes. Then, we also set meetings up with policymakers, lawmakers so you can meet with your representative, your senator, share your story, and then hopefully get them to support legislation or policy issues that will ultimately improve safety.

Those are the things that you know could be doing if you’re listening as a survivor or as a family member. But if you know someone who falls into one of those camps, please connect them with us because, again, we want to help them share their story and we want to help them become educators and advocates to whatever level they feel comfortable doing.

Again, it could be as little as, “Hey, I want to sign onto a letter you guys are doing that says, you should move forward with a bill to require speed limiters.” Or it could be, “Hey, I want to come into your next fly-in DC and I want to learn more and I want to meet with other families and I want to meet with my lawmaker.” We’ll make that happen.

Then, we want to meet those people where they’re at. Again, just help them heal, help them do what they can after the crash. If that’s helping fight for these policies that will ensure other folks aren’t enduring the pain that they have to endure, then that’s what we want to help with.

David Craig – Host:

Well, I appreciate that. I know people don’t understand, when a devastating event happens to families, oftentimes they’re never put back in a place financially even where they were before. People don’t realize that with semis, the minimum limits of insurance is $750,000. Oftentimes, that’s very inadequate to take care of these families.

A lot of times what motivates my clients are making changes. They can reach out to you and do that. I certainly need to do a better job of getting my clients over to you, but I think that it’s recently we settled a case and my client agreed to take half a million dollars less if this company would change their policies on driving fatigued and take a more active role.

They fought us on it, but eventually they agreed to take a half a million dollars, pay us half a million dollars less, and they agreed to make the changes that we wanted recommended. Oftentimes, people think of the victims as people who are money hungry and you know as well as I do, there’s nothing that could be further from the truth.

These people just don’t want something like this to happen to any other family that they’ve had to go through.

Harry Adler:

Yeah. I completely agree. Then we didn’t touch on it. We’ll probably have to touch on it at some other podcast, but the minimum insurance most certainly needs to be raised. It’s a really critical safety issue. I think folks just think about it as something about after the crash. I will say we have worked with numerous families that have just been financially devastated because they were unlucky enough to be in a truck crash.

That’s a really twisted thing that I have to say, that you are financially devastated because you were unlucky enough to be in a truck crash. That should not sit well with people. I hope it doesn’t, but that is the reality of what happens when a family is involved and the policy limit is $750,000 or million dollars, but the reason it also needs to be increased is because it could be a powerful safety tool.

The federal government does not have the adequate resources, whether it’s time or money or people to actually provide oversight to the hundreds of thousands of motor carriers. What needs to happen is the insurance companies need to play a more active role, but at $750,000 and a million, some of the more cynical ones play a numbers game where they spread out the risk and they don’t mind a $750 or a million-dollar payout here and there.

If that amount, 750, which was set in 1980 were to be increased to account for medical cost inflation, the minimum insurance would be roughly $5.5 million. I can assure you that if it were that amount, insurance companies would provide a lot more scrutiny to the companies that they provide policies to.

They’d be engaging in onsite inspections. They’d be seriously looking at the vehicles that these people are putting on roads, the safety records of the drivers, their overall safety records as it relates to a national average and other people they write policies for. What would happen is that they would say to some of these companies that they’re currently writing policies for, “I don’t think so. You are way too unsafe. We are not writing you a policy.”

Absent that policy, those companies can’t operate on our roads. That’s how it works as a safety tool. That’s why it’s important for us to increase it, because we could be stopping so many of these crashes before they even happen because we don’t let the company that’s going to take it from an “if” to a “when” to start operating.

I know we didn’t speak much about it. But yeah, I’m very passionate about the issue of increasing minimum insurance because I’ve seen what it has done to families, but I also know the potential it has to prevent that from happening.

David Craig – Host:

Well again, Harry, I appreciate you taking the time. That’s something we may want to go back and talk about because I think we could spend a lot of time …

Harry Adler:

Yeah.

David Craig – Host:

… giving examples and talking about it, because I mean to the layperson, $750,000 may seem a lot, but if you’ve been through one of these events, you realize that is nothing. I have people who are paralyzed, that their life care plans are as astronomical and $750,000 doesn’t touch anything.

Let’s maybe do another one in the future where we can talk about it, but keep up the great work. Thank you for everything you and your company do to make the highway safer.

Harry Adler:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much, and I look forward to working with you and also your clients because again, we want to help them share their story and do what we can to provide any services to them.

David Craig – Host:

This is David Craig and you’ve been listening to After the Crash. If you’d like more information about me or my law firm, please go to our website, ckflaw.com, or if you’d like to talk to me, you can call 1-800-ASK-DAVID. If you would like a guide on what to do after a truck wreck, then pick up my book, Semi-Truck Wreck: A Guide for Victims and Their Families, which is available on Amazon, or you can download it for free on our website, ckflaw.com.