Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/535950
Voices 4 | Overdrive | July 2015 A May editorial in the Savannah Morning News, "Get tired truckers off the roads," took a critical look at a Georgia crash that the state patrol says was the result of a truck failing to slow down for an Inter- state 16 stoppage. The crash resulted in five deaths, all college students. At press time, Georgia hadn't filed charges in the accident, but wrongful death lawsuits against the trucking companies involved have been filed. The same week, an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia, yielding talk of technological fixes to such extreme accidents. Both incidents followed closely on the heels of both Freightlin- er's autonomous truck announcement and Gary Falldin's talk at the Truck- load Carriers Association's Safety & Security Division annual meeting. Falldin, safety vice president at Transport America, detailed the Ea- gan, Minn.-based company's adoption of active-braking technology that has been deployed nearly fleetwide. Such systems stop the vehicle if its radar senses a crash is imminent. The Morning News reports that law- suits in the Georgia crash allege "that the truck was equipped with a collision avoidance system, which is designed to warn drivers as they approach objects in the highway." But given the accident's severity, the truck may not have been equipped with the kind of active-braking tech that Transport America is using. "We've got a good buy-in with the drivers," said Falldin. "We have not had a rear-end collision with the active braking" systems except for a driver who ran into a sandstorm. Falldin also noted that hard-brake events still lead to conversations and "coach- ing" with drivers, also enabled by technology that monitors such events recorded by the electronic control module. "We still talk to every driver with a hard-brake event," he said. Landstar-leased owner-operator Gary Buchs opted in to hard-brake monitoring after the company began requiring electronic logging platforms for new contractors and pledged to upgrade existing contractors to the platform at no cost. Buchs later con- cluded that it was more of a deterrent to his own safe operation than the opposite. "It caused me to run a red light," he says. "I was worried about hitting my brakes too hard. I had gotten a call a week before after a car made a rolling turn at a stop light and I had to hit the brakes too hard. They called and said, 'What'd you do?' I knew I'd done the right thing." He asked the person on the other Safety tech's backfire How collision avoidance system monitoring can encourage unsafe driving If you missed it in these pages last month, search "Are driving skills about to be devalued?" at OverdriveOnline. com for Overdrive Editorial Director Max Heine's critical look at the tradeoffs in pride, attention and more that are likely to come with increasingly autono- mous vehicles – trucks included. You've got to turn that thing off on my truck. — What owner-operator Gary Buchs told fleet personnel once he realized hard-brake monitoring protocol caused him to hesitate in a safety-critical moment