Making Trucking Safer in the United States

Harry Adler:
In 2021, that’s the last year of available data, 5,788 people killed in large truck crashes. We have a situation where things are getting worse and we have to try and reconcile a couple of things that we know to be true. We know that there are companies that invest in training programs and hiring safe drivers and technologies. Those companies are seeing reductions in their crashes, in their injuries and their deaths. So that means that these good guys, they’re getting better, but the bad guys are getting worse at a faster rate.

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 wreck, 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.
All right. Well, welcome to another episode of After the Crash. This is Attorney David Craig with the law firm of Craig, Kelley & Faultless, and today, we’re happy to have Harry Adler back. Harry is with the Institute for Safer Trucking. Welcome, Harry.

Harry Adler:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

David Craig – Host:
Again, this is for the average everyday person out there, not just attorneys. So, tell us a little bit about what the Institute for Safer Trucking is.

Harry Adler:
Yeah, thanks. So, we’re a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. and we really try and do three things. Most important to us is helping those who have been adversely affected in large truck crashes. So, that’s survivors and families of victims and really just helping them after the crash however we can, and so that could be connecting them with other people who’ve been through a similar circumstance or having them on our monthly Zoom calls where we have a variety of speakers. Again, just offer an opportunity for people to share their stories.
We also do education and advocacy about ways to make the trucking industry safer, and so that could be everything from vehicle enhancements like automatic emergency braking or technologies that have existed in trucks for decades like speed limiters and advocating for those to be used. Then, also things like increasing the minimum insurance that interesting motor carriers required in order to be operating on our roads.
The reason for that, we can talk to more at length, but that’s just another thing where it doesn’t necessarily have to be a vehicle related thing or a driver related policy, but there are also different things that the public can get engaged on that can make the trucking industry safer. Then, the last thing we want to do is we want to make sure that we’re doing everything as collaboratively as possible. I think that a lot of folks look at this space and say, “Well, there must be safety advocates on one side and the trucking industry on one side, or personal injury attorneys on one side.”
I think we can all be on the side of safety, and I think that’s what’s so important to our organization is recognizing that there’s a lot more that we agree on than we disagree on. So, let’s focus on those agreements while we can and then we can work out the differences on the areas we can’t come to terms with. So yeah, those are the three things that our organization really focuses on.

David Craig – Host:
I know that my law firm in particular, we’ve worked with you as has the Indiana Trial Lawyers Association where there was a lobbying effort put in place by the trucking industry to try to change some of the laws that we believed were not consumer friendly. So, I would imagine that you work across the country in helping educate lawyers and people in the House and Senate, not only on the national level, but also helping the state level.

Harry Adler:
Obviously, we want to get as involved as possible with state efforts, and I will admit it’s much nicer to be on offense than it is to be on defense, but unfortunately what we’re seeing is this trend around the country where there are these efforts and they’re often presented as tort reform, but really what they’ll do is they’ll make it much more difficult for victims of truck crashes, these families, these survivors, to hold the companies that hurt them accountable.
That’s so bad for a variety of reasons. One, because as I mentioned before, we work with this population and we see firsthand the difference between a family that has actually received a payout that is fair and just versus those who haven’t. It is truly night and day in terms of just their experiences and how it affects their life, not just in the short term but in the long term. But then when you start to think about this idea of accountability, it is such an important term when we think about safety because without it, we can’t ensure that there’s going to be safe trucks operating on a road next to our loved ones next to us.
So, when you start to strip away at accountability, you start to say to the industry, “All right, guys. You can start driving unsafe. You can have a couple of deaths here, a couple of injuries because we’ll just chalk it up to being the cost of doing business and we’re not going to hold you accountable for it.” Whereas when the companies are held accountable, they start to say, “You know what? Let’s not just hire any guy. Let’s not just put any truck on our road.”
We’ve had an experience where an attorney much like yourself said right in court and told a jury and they say, “How could this possibly be right,” and they learn from that, but when you don’t have that, you don’t have that learning experience, the companies start to just say, “You know what? Whatever will be the cheapest, whatever will be the fastest.” That’ll be what wins out. So, that’s why we get involved on those state efforts because I think a lot of folks don’t see them as a safety issue, and it’s our job to present to them why it very much is.

David Craig – Host:
What’s scary is that you all and others like you have been very successful on the national level. Like you said, you’re kind of on the offense. You’re working with the industry trying to make things safer, but at the same time, we’re seeing an attack at the state levels. Something gets through in Texas and the next thing we see is it’s spreading like wildfire everywhere. We had a case in Iowa and they passed caps in Iowa, and I mean all over the whole country, we’re seeing this attack on a state by state level versus the national level.

Harry Adler:
Yeah, and I think that folks should remember that there are interests in the trucking industry that are incredibly well-funded and incredibly effective at messaging. I think a good example is just a quick aside, was this whole myth that there was a truck driver shortage. I think even some of the best advocates I know out there found themselves repeating this, and when you really looked at the numbers, new entrants, new CDLs issued, it didn’t really support this idea that there was a shortage. What was really happening was that there was a really bad turnover issue and there still is in some segments of the industry.
I mean, companies reporting triple digit turnover rates. That’s crazy, and when you start to think about that and you say, “Well, how did we all believe that,” where you would cite this truck driver shortage was from ATRI? It was from the research arm of the American Trucking Associations, and when you actually start to dig into the citation, it’s really sort of stunning because their chief economist just cites himself every year and it becomes this snowball citation where you’re like, “Wow, this is really backed up by something.” So, we all believed that there was this truck driver shortage when in fact it was a turnover issue.
You say, “Well, what does it matter, the difference? They’re both economic problems.” Well, the difference is that when you have a shortage, it becomes a lot easier to go to Congress and say, “Hey, you know what? At 21, we’re just not getting enough drivers, and if we could lower the age to 18, we can do it. Don’t worry, we’re going to make sure that they’re driving in trucks that have a suite of safety devices. Well, there’s a couple of problems there. One, if those safety devices are so good, we shouldn’t be using them as an offset to the most dangerous drivers.
Male drivers 18 to 21 are really not great drivers, and instead we should be putting that on all the trucks, but secondly, if you are going to do it, what’s to stop this 18-year-old from learning for two years on this truck and driving on this truck and then going to another company that has none of those devices? That driver could very quickly get into a crash.

David Craig – Host:
I took my folks out to learn how the drive semis just so that we’d have a better respect for the driver. Those things are complicated and you have to be paying attention. It’s not like driving a car. I mean these are 40 tons and they’re huge and everything is different. You have a lot more equipment, you’ve got gears, you’ve got to do all these things and you can’t not pay attention for a second without endangering people, and so it’s not an easy job. I respect truckers that are out there who are safety conscious. You and I both know there are good trucking companies, and unfortunately though, I mean you have your pulse on the community on what’s going on in the trucking world, but is it really safer out there right now? I mean, there’s good and bad, but is it safer on the roadways?

Harry Adler:
Unfortunately, the data says no. Right? When we look at the number of deaths, when we look at the number of injuries and how they have gone up, right? In 2021, that’s the last year of available data, 5,788 people killed in large truck crashes. If you rewind back to 2009, there were 3,380 people killed. I picked that year because that’s the lowest year we have on record in recent history. So, when you start to consider that, you say, “Okay, well it jumped from 3,380 a year to 5,788.” That is almost a 50% increase.
Did the truck vehicle miles traveled go up that much? No, they didn’t. Not even close. Did the number of trucks on our roads go up? No, but they did go up. So, a couple of things there. We still have more trucks traveling. We still have more trucks on the road, not as much to justify these increases in injuries and deaths.
So much for all of those people over the last 10 years who argued that if we have bigger trucks or if we got these exemptions, we’ll have fewer trucks; that didn’t pan out. So, going back to this point though of we have a situation where things are getting worse. We have to try and reconcile a couple of things that we know to be true. We know that there are companies that invest in training programs and hiring safe drivers and technologies. So, those companies are seeing reductions in their crashes, in their injuries and their deaths.
So that means that these good guys, they’re getting better, but the bad guys are getting worse at a faster rate. We say this constantly at the Institute for Safer Trucking. The bad actors are getting worse at a faster rate than the good guys are improving their safety. That is what’s ultimately the problem, and when you start to say, “Well, why do you guys advocate for a regulation?” Well, it’s because we are recognizing that there are guys who are voluntarily doing the things that we’re asking for and these bad actors are not. It’s causing these problems to subsist.
So, going back to my earlier point where I was talking about this idea where there are folks in the trucking industry that I think are quite masterful at painting a problem. What they’ve done now is they said, “Don’t worry, things aren’t getting worse, and by the way, we are the ones who are actually the victims here as these attorneys sue us, and they use these terms that are so bombastic.”
They say judicial hellhole, they say nuclear verdict, and so they talk in these terms that they make it sound catastrophic. Right? I think what needs to be done is that without sounding alarmist, but I think we should be at this point, we on the side of safety need to say that it’s critical here. This is an unacceptable number of people being killed. This is an unacceptable number of people being injured. We can allow this to become the status quo or get worse. And that’s what’s been happening. It’s just been trending in the wrong direction. This is despite, again, advancements in safety that we know are being equipped and adopted by some of the leading companies that have a large number of trucks.

David Craig – Host:
Well, I couldn’t agree more, obviously, and I think it’s scary. I’m on the highways. I’ve been representing victims of semi-truck wrecks and big truck and commercial motor vehicle cases for over 35 years and I’m more scared now to be on the highways with trucks than I’ve ever been. Now, I know a little bit more like what I’m looking for. I mean, there’s so many bad truck trucking companies out there that are small operations that I know are running with minimum insurance or that I know that are running with bad equipment, and it is really scary.
I just drove down to Atlanta for the ATAA conference. I just like to drive, and so I drove from Indianapolis to Atlanta and back, and it was amazing to me what I saw. I’m certainly more observant than the average person, but it’s scary. Especially as I go into construction zones. It’s just amazing to me how many semis are just flying up and through these construction zones, but they’re not the big carrier. They’re not some of the carriers that I know are safe. I see those folks dropping back, slowing down, doing what they’re supposed to do, staying in the lane.
So I mean, certainly they know what to do, but some of these people just seem not to care or maybe they’re being pressured or pushed to get a job done. So, it is scarier for me, and it should be for the public.

Harry Adler:
You mentioned work zones. The statistics there should be frightening to people. I mean, one out of every three fatal work zone crashes involves a large truck. That’s a huge overrepresentation, right? Trucks make up about 4% or 5% of our vehicle fleet. They account for about 12% of the total vehicle miles traveled. So, why are they involved in one out of three? Because you just hit the nail on the head. These aren’t one-off instances where you have these truck drivers, and some of these trucking companies that are just totally unsafely operating.
Again, it’s to meet the unrealistic deadline, and the public is ultimately the one who pays for all of this, right? When you consider a property damage only crash, I was talking to my sister the other day, she lives up in New York, and this overpass by the bridge was struck because a truck didn’t have the proper clearance and it struck the overpass, shut down part of the throughway for several hours.
There’s going to need to be probably hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of repair, and this is a property damage only crash, and you start to think, “Well, when these companies have $750,000 worth of insurance and they start to do substantial amounts of infrastructure,” who do people think pays? Right? Ultimately, your municipality can go in and try and collect some of this, but ultimately what they don’t is passed on to the taxpayer. We see these crashes happen quite a lot. There’s hundreds of thousands of property damage only crashes, and these are just the ones that are reported.
When we talk about a crash that is reported, that means that there was a police officer involved in some way, shape, or form. Absent that, it is not necessarily certain that it’s even captured. So, there are all of these truck crashes where you might not even get a police accident report, but needless to say, there are these crashes that cost us hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars when you start to aggregate them all. When you consider that there’s $750,000, and that’s per crash, and if there’s just one injured party there.

David Craig – Host:
Yeah, I think-

Harry Adler:
All of a sudden-

David Craig – Host:
Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Harry Adler:
Yeah. All of a sudden, you can’t tell me that the 750, even a million dollars is going to cover that.

David Craig – Host:
And some people listening to this may not know what the insurance limits are for a trucking company. So, let’s talk a little bit about insurance. I’ve had cases, and I know you’ve seen victims where the life care plan is in the tens of millions to take care of somebody for the rest of their life. So, when you think about it, if they have only $750,000, then that’s not going to take care of these people. So again, your point is, so it shifts. I mean, who does take care of it? We all do, and the taxpayers or the victims don’t get properly cared for. So, maybe talk a little bit about insurance limits. Let’s talk about that. I know the trucking companies and industry has been against raising it. It’s been the same since I think 1980. Is that right?

Harry Adler:
Yeah. I always think when we talk about the trucking industry, as you know, it’s so diverse, there’s different interests within it, and so to explain the issue of insurance, I think it’s important to note that there is a schism wherein a lot of the larger carriers are supportive of higher insurance minimums. Whereas the main opposition comes from really a group called Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. They represent small drivers, owner operators and independent operators, but they also are funded by an insurance company that mainly operates in 750 and million dollar policies. So there’s a financial interest for them to keep it at that level. They don’t know that they could play ball, so to speak, if the insurance minimums were raised.
We actually think increasing the minimum insurance is also in the interest of the small owner operator, and we’ll get to that in a bit, but to give some context, back in 1980, the Motor Carrier Act deregulated the trucking industry, right? Everyone always attributes this to Reagan, but I was just thinking about it, given it was Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday, it actually passed under him. It was implemented under Reagan, but the Motor Carrier Act helped deregulate the trucking industry. It was wildly different before, and in anticipation that Congress knew that there would be a large influx of trucking companies, new motor carriers, and to recognize that they as the federal government wouldn’t have the capability to provide all the oversight, they didn’t have the manpower, the funding, they wanted to figure ways that they could get the private sector, the insurance companies to sort help backstop with the oversight.
So, the concept of minimum insurance came up where you would say, “You need to have $750,000 to cover the cost of a crash that your truck would be involved in.” That way insurance companies would go in and say, “Okay, is this company safe? Do they have a good safety record? What do their facilities look like?” It could be a variety of things, but the hope was that they would do onsite inspections and they would then say, “If you’re good, we’re down to insure. And if not, then no.” And absent the insurance, you couldn’t operate an interstate motor commerce.
So, that was implemented, and by the way, at the time there were discussions to even have it as high as $2 million. If you actually go back to the legislative history, and unfortunately, the insurance companies were able to persuade Congress that $2 million would be too much money, but it ultimately landed on $750,000. This was per event. So, it’s not like when you get into an airline, you’re sort of insured per person when you sit down on an airplane, this was per event, and they also put in language that said that this should be increased. This should be something that is relative to the cost of what a crash actually is, and they gave the Secretary of Transportation the ability to increase this amount.
Fast forward to today, it has never been increased to account for inflation. A more appropriate measure would be medical cost inflation, and if you actually look at medical cost inflation, it would be $5.4 million in today’s dollars. So it’s just been a huge increase on that front. This amount is really tethered to that in large part. So, we haven’t seen any increase. We’ve tried to advocate Congress to make sure that that happens, and there’s been legislation that’s been introduced in the past several sessions of Congress.
That would increase the minimum insurance from $750,000 to $5 million and then index it to inflation moving forward so that you wouldn’t have another four decades of inaction. So, the insurance definitely is something that is a huge problem because right now, the $750,000 no longer incentivizes insurance companies to actually provide any oversight. Instead, it incentivizes them to play a very cynical numbers game.
That’s where they go in and they say, you know what? We’re going to insure these unsafe companies. We know that their safety records are spotty. But you know what? We’ll take the risk. Because at the end of the day, a payout of $750, a payout of $1 million is a drop in the bucket for us. If that amount were $5 million, I can assure you that these insurance companies would start to do onsite inspections. They would start to provide a lot more scrutiny to the companies that they’re doing business with because they wouldn’t want to pay out $5 million.

David Craig – Host:
I mean, there’s the bigger companies who have multiple tiers of insurance, so they have lots of insurance, and by far, even though they’re not perfect, they certainly have more safety procedures in place than the folks that are running with $750. The ones that I see running with $750 oftentimes have nothing. They have no safety. Their safety director, if they have one, is their cousin or somebody who has no experience in the industry, and so like you said, I mean, there’s no incentive. They’re running with bad equipment, and so, you already see it.
You see responsible companies that have higher insurance taking better steps to protect the public, but unfortunately, there’s just so many out there that seem to have the minimum of $750 or maybe they have a million.

Harry Adler:
That is the problem. This amount is so easily attainable that really fly-by-night companies, chameleon carriers oftentimes are able to just get back into the industry. When you run an operation where you’re just saying, “I’m going to get any truck that sort of moves, anybody that’s warm enough,” and we’re going to go. You don’t think or need a safety director. You don’t want to think about anything because they’re just costs. They’re never seen as investments.
I think when you start to look at the companies, again, the ones that have more assets, they see safety as an investment. They see them buying the trucks with the additional safety feature as an investment. You go to a company that again is just trying to make a quick buck, they see it as a cost. And so there are two fundamentally different approaches to the same thing. The outcomes are fundamentally different. One is a company that is probably going to kill someone or injure them, and the other is a company that is going to feel godawful if they do.

David Craig – Host:
That’s a great point. Well, let’s talk about another area that I get frustrated with and have been seeing more issues with is the shipper-broker area. Let’s talk a little bit about that. What’s your opinion in that area?

Harry Adler:
I think going back to the earlier point of safety is getting worse, and we’ve now talked about these small trucking companies, the ones that see safety as a cost, that want to engage dangerously, that have the $750,000 that’ll hire their cousin as a safety director. Who’s hiring them? When you start to think about it, yes, you have shippers, some of whom have their operations where they’ll sort of engage directly.
We also know that now there’s just a huge influx of these motor carriers. We know there’s hundreds of thousands of them. So we need to connect these, the people who are making the goods and shipping the goods with them, and that’s where brokers come in. So, brokers have now become an essential part of the modern trucking industry, and they have immense-

David Craig – Host:
Tell the audience what a broker is. Some of them may not know.

Harry Adler:
So, a broker basically will be this person who connects, “I am the maker, the purveyor of good A, and I want to get it to the consumer, or I want to get it to another business, and I’m going to go through this broker to help make that happen.” So, these brokers have become essential really to, again, the modern trucking industry. They have immense power and control, some of them, and some of them make a lot of money.
In fact, that is them making a lot of money also is a big safety. It plays into some of the safety issues because it’s fed in part because of the way that truck drivers are paid and a large amount of the way that the truck driving payment schemes happen, which is pay per mile, but we will put a pin in that. These brokers have a lot of power over saying who is going to get this load and where is it going to go and how is it going to get there, and how quickly is it going to get there?
There has been this concerted effort over the last couple of years, and we’ve seen a bill introduced in the last several sessions of Congress to effectively shield shippers and brokers from liability for hiring really unsafe motor carriers, and the worst part about this effort is that they’ve done a really good job of disguising it as something that would actually improve safety. They call this bill the Motor Carrier Safety Selection Standard Act, and that’s the only time I’m going to say the name of the bill because I hate endorsing it in any way.
This bill will do nothing to improve safety. In fact, it would actually degrade safety immensely. It’s because the bill would say if you are a shipper or broker, you would be deemed to have made the selection of a motor carrier in a “reasonable and prudent manner” if they ensure that the motor carrier has a DOT number, they have the minimum insurance, $750,000, and they’re not determined unfit by the DOT.
So, what I mean by determined unfit is motor carriers can basically be audited, and there’s a determination whether or not they are fit or unfit to continue operations. These reviews can happen every three, four or five years. There are reviews that are older than my niece and she’s just turned three. So, that is nothing in terms of a company’s actual safety record, right? Anyone can get a DOT number. I mean, getting $750,000 is incredibly easy in terms of coverage.
Again, you just don’t have to be determined unfit. So many unsafe carriers would satisfy this standard. I mean, it would create a complete race to the bottom. I mean, you could have companies that hire drivers who have records of drug abuse while operating. You could have, again, high risk carriers. There is literally a list of high risk carriers that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has.
You could hire one of those companies and you’d still be considered to have made a reasonable and prudent hiring decision. It’s a laughable standard. Reincarnated and chameleon carriers could satisfy this, and so this is a real problem because, again, they have been very effective in terms of their messaging about this bill saying, “Well, this will actually improve safety. We’ll now have a standard.” And again, it is just such a laughably low standard that we’ve been having to work to just go in and educate people. Again, just very clearly explain to them, “Listen, this is an example of a carrier that would satisfy this.”

David Craig – Host:
If anybody has an interest, they ought to go on YouTube and just look at the brokers. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of folks on brokers that are out. I mean, some of these brokerage companies are running them out of apartments. They’re running them out of trailers. So, a shipper says, “Okay, here’s why I’m willing to pay to get my product from A to B,” and the broker comes in and they find somebody who’ll haul it cheaply. Then, they make a cut off of the profits. Of course, there’s a lot of trucking companies out there.
If they have bad equipment, they don’t put money in maintenance, they don’t put money into drivers, and they’re running bad drivers, bad equipment. They can do it a lot cheaper than somebody else. And these brokers don’t have to have insurance. I mean, they don’t have $750,000. They don’t have a million dollars. They have a bond, I think is last time I checked and that’s it. So, you’ve got these people out there. Now, there are big brokerage companies that make a lot of money because like you said, there’s a lot of money in it, and I’ve sued big brokerage companies, but it’s just scary.
I’ve seen videos of truckers who said they’re getting out of the trucking business. That it’s better to be in the brokerage business. You could make more money and it’s a lot easier, but they don’t care. They’re not doing any background checks whatsoever to see if these trucking companies should be on our highways. It’s laughable if it wasn’t deadly.

Harry Adler:
Unfortunately, it is part of this trend where there are folks who are prioritizing just how much can I profit and how little accountability can I take while doing so. More for me, but less blame for me. It’s truly unfortunate because when you look at what this bill purported to be, which was a way to ensure that we were having motor carriers that were being selected safely, you’d create a real hiring standard. Our organization is not just about being a naysayer in terms of saying, “Yeah, this bill, it’s garbage.” I’m going to just say that flatly because I think that’s probably the most polite way I could address this bill. I think it is garbage.
But we then go in and say, “You know what? Here’s really what you should have done instead and something that we could get behind.” You have a national hiring standard where you have shippers and brokers having to look into whether or not a motor carrier, what their crash rates are. What’s their driver and vehicle out of service rates and violations? Do they have any driver screening or training policies? What kind of vehicle maintenance do they do?
Are they investing in safety technologies? These are all things that if they looked into them, it would actually give them a very accurate picture of the company’s value for safety. So, that’s what a national hiring standard would look like, and maybe, you know what? If you said, “Yeah, you know what? This guy looked into all of these things, right?” Well, then you know what? I think that that would be something to say, “Yeah, that does seem reasonable. That does seem prudent.”
So, it’s not to say that you can’t have a standard which you would deem someone reasonable and prudent, but if you are going to have one, let’s have the words mean what they mean.

David Craig – Host:
Couldn’t agree with you more. So, the other trend I see is trucks are getting bigger, getting heavier, and I’ve heard arguments that that’s good for us, that it’s actually better for the economy. What’s your feelings about the bigger and heavier trucks?

Harry Adler:
Oh, I’m not a fan. Again, I think this is a perfect example where we buy into a myth and then when the myth is exposed, we don’t learn from it. I’m just wondering when folks are going to recognize that this is never going to be true, this notion that if we just make the trucks a little bigger, a little longer, a little heavier, we’re going to have fewer trucks on the road and there’ll be fewer crashes. It’s just never panned out that way.
We look back over the last three decades and you’ve seen trucks get longer and you’ve seen trucks get heavier, but we’ve seen more and more trucks on a road. Even over the last 10 years, there’s been various industries, like certain agricultural segments, certain states that have asked for heavier trucks for longer trucks. We haven’t seen a reduction in trucks in any of those areas.
So again, it doesn’t really pan out, but you also have to start to consider a couple of things. I mentioned earlier on that there was this turnover issue. So, when you start to consider that, you start to ask what number of qualified drivers do we have? And then of that, what subset are actually qualified to drive, say doubles, which requires a special endorsement. So, that if you were to say, go ahead with the longer trucks, and the big push there is for these things called double 33.
So, when you have a double configuration right now, it’s about a 28, 28.5 foot pup. There are two of them. They want to elongate each of those to 33 feet. At that length, you would have enough drivers who would say it’s probably worth their while to replace a single 53-foot trailer with those two 33-foot pups.
That would be a big problem because again, these configurations when you even just look at a double versus a single much higher likelihood of a rollover, and that’s because you have things like rearward amplification. Again, just the center of gravity becomes that much more difficult when you’re now having two trailing vehicles as opposed to just one. So, we don’t really want these vehicles… You’ll also see other things. If you start to introduce these doubles into dense urban areas, higher instances of what’s known as low speed off-tracking. That’s when the front set of axles travels one path, the rear most set of axles travels a tighter path, and it makes it much more dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists, especially when a truck is making that right hook.
So, these are a more dangerous configuration. We don’t want them. They’re also terrible for small business. I mean, you really almost need two people to operate them. Companies like FedEx and UPS, they’ve figured that out already. So, they’d be very advantaged in terms of just the operation of loading and unloading these vehicles, but that’s the problem with these longer trucks. Then, these heavier trucks, these pushes to go from 80,000 pounds to 91,000 pounds or even heavier than that, it’s going to be more damaging if these trucks are involved in a crash. I mean, that’s simple physics, right? We’re going to make the vehicle even heavier. It’s going to be that much more devastating.
The other problem is that these trucks will have higher likelihoods of brake violations and out of service. We’re going to start degrading those faster. It’s terrible for our infrastructure. I mean, pavement is much more related to the per axle weight, but when you start to look at bridges in this country, it’s related to total weight. These bridges are built to a 1975 bridge formula, which never really even accounted for trucks to be this heavy. We just have a slew of bridges that would require either repairs repost or just really probably altogether just a new bridge to accommodate for these heavier trucks.
It’s not a sustainable thing right now just based on where we’re at, even though we had a massive infrastructure bill with huge investments. We’re nowhere near to addressing the amount of bridge backlogs. So this idea that we should say, “Yeah, let’s do some heavier trucks. I know we’re not going to get to all the bridges right now, but let’s just chance it guys and hope that we don’t have a highway or a bridge collapse.” I mean, we should be realistic and we shouldn’t be pushing forward with these, again, these heavier trucks that do much worse damage to our infrastructure because a couple of companies tell us so.
Then, the real reason when you look at why there’s heavier trucks, why there’s longer trucks, it comes from a couple of big business interests. The heavier trucks are, they’re being pushed by companies that ship goods that are heavy. So, think like beer. They might fill up a truck and hit the weight limit at 80,000 pounds and still have a certain amount of space in the trailer. So, that’s called weighing out. Whereas you take a company like Amazon that’s shipping a lot of packages and there’s a lot of empty and dead space, they might fill up the trailer completely and still have another 30 or 40,000 pounds before they hit 80,000.
So, that’s called cubing out. So, they want longer trucks to expand the capacity. So there are different interests that are driving them, but our position is the same on both. Until folks can prove that these heavier or longer configurations would either operate more safely than existing configurations or that somehow it would not do the damage to the infrastructure that the DOT has said it would, there’s no reason to support heavier trucks right now. There’s no reason to support longer trucks.

David Craig – Host:
Well, I think that anybody who’s been on the roadway recently can see the damage is already done. I don’t think people want more damage. I think one of the things that people forget sometimes is that you’re advocating safety, and that’s for all of us that are sharing the roadways, but it’s also for the truckers. I mean, the truck drivers, they’re in danger as well, and when they’re driving bigger equipment, when they’re driving heavier equipment, it’s harder to stop, harder to maneuver.
I hear trucks sometimes they’re trying to, in the end, they try to pass, make it so you could drive faster. They want you to go heavier, longer, faster, adnd not all truck drivers are on board of that. Some truckers will tell you, and I do a lot of videos and a lot of blogs and a lot informational stuff that we put out, and I get truckers all the time to comment, and a lot of them comment about how the quality of the drivers are worse.
You’ve got bad drivers, you’ve got poorly trained drivers, you’ve got some companies that are pushing their drivers too hard, and so, safety helps everybody. It helps the truckers, it helps ultimately, all of us. It doesn’t shift the cost to the consumer. It lets the people who are responsible pay for it. So I know I appreciate everything you and your organization does for the safety. Is there anything else, any other area? I always feel like when we get done, it’s like there’s five or six other areas we could talk about. So hopefully, I can keep inviting you back every six months or so and you can update us.

Harry Adler:
Yeah. I mean, because again, I think so many of these issues are interconnected, and I think to your point, I mean, one of the things that we stress is that the number of truck occupant deaths is its highest levels in, I think the last 40 years. So, this is an issue that is affecting the truck drivers, other occupants in those trucks. It is something that we care about. I mentioned earlier that when we advocate for something like minimum insurance, I think about a truck driver. I think about all the crashes that come across my desk where it is a truck on truck or two trucks and maybe another two or three vehicles involved. That truck driver who may have been doing everything correctly and is involved and was rear-ended and has his vehicle totaled, right?
The truck is a lot of money, especially if it’s maybe a new one he just got. It’s like two years old. He just spent six figures on it, but he’s involved in a crash where there’s several other parties, and really that guy had $750,000, and then after all said and done, he maybe only sees a check for $25,000 or $50,000. His career could be ruined. Everything he worked for gone because some other irresponsible truck driver who didn’t have insurance or really an adequate amount of insurance hit him. That’s not fair.
So when we talk about these issues, we are thinking about how they’re affecting all the different people in the industry and we’re thinking about how they affect the truck driver. When we think about something like automatic emergency braking, we don’t see it as a driver replacement technology. We see it as driver assistance technology. That’s why we call it that, because it’s something there to assist the driver where for whatever reason, if they are not having full attention, if they fall asleep, if they’re distracted, if they’re impaired, this not only prevents them from possibly killing or seriously maiming someone, which they would have to live with the rest of their life, but it could also save them, right?
These crashes where you hear a truck driver veered off the road and crashed into a tree, it’s like you have to wonder, “Well, what caused that? Was it a medical episode? Was it them falling asleep?” But regardless of that, could they have been saved if they had automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and a suite of other safety technologies that would’ve either mitigated the crash or prevented it altogether?

David Craig – Host:
Yep. Absolutely. Well, Harry, again, I appreciate you being on here. And if there’s nothing else, then we’ll end today. And again, I’ll invite you back in six months or so and we’ll see what new things are trying to get through.

Harry Adler:
Yeah. I mean, hopefully by then we can update you on speed limiter regulation. I think that might be the next big thing coming, and our organization is hopeful that the agencies move, ironically, move quickly on the speed limiter regulation, but yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s always great to come here and be able to just talk and share about truck safety.

David Craig – Host:
One last thing is how can people get ahold of you and the Institute for Safer Trucking?

Harry Adler:
So you can go to our website, which is safertrucking.org. We’re also on all the various social media, but you can reach out to us through our website. We have a contact page, but also anyone who’s listening to this can feel free to email me. It’s hadler, H-A-D as in dog, L-E-R, @safertrucking.org. I always joke to folks, we are not limited by hours of service, so really reach out to us at any time and we’ll get back to you and connect.

David Craig – Host:
Fantastic. Thanks, Harry.

Harry Adler:
Thanks.

David Craig – Host:
This is David Craig, and you’ve been listening to After the Crash. If you’d 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, Semitruck 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.