Safety groups continue to argue that commercial drivers pose a significant threat to road safety. Organisations and political leaders tend to favour proposals that serve their own agendas.
Vilification of professional truck drivers is all too common and it is time to set the record straight with factual statistics.
SafeRoads.org is one of the biggest voices in condemning professional truck drivers and road safety, often mentioning that fatigue “plays a role in up to 30-40% of heavy truck accidents”. The problem with this claim is that it is completely false.
Today, the truth is that commercial vehicles are involved in 2.4% of all car accidents, and more than 80% of these accidents are not caused by the driver of a commercial vehicle. Furthermore, only 16% of truck accidents are caused by driver error, and only 4% of fatal accidents are caused by truck fatigue.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Job Description has finally stated that “fatigue” is not a cause of truck accidents. According to the FMCSA’s Analysis Division report, “2009: Historic Truck Crash Declines,” the FMCSA found that truck driver fatigue played a role in only 1.4 percent of fatal truck crashes.
Because safety groups are constantly discussing the dangerous safety risks of truckers and their drivers, it is important to report actual truck accident and fatality statistics because they are comparable to driver data.
Below we list 5 major trucking companies, indicating the number of miles driven per year, the number of reported accidents, the number of fatalities (average), and the average number of accidents and fatalities per 100,000 miles driven per year: