Statistics suggest trucks not main crash culprits
Explosions and ever-rising fireballs lit up the night sky Tuesday on a busy highway north of Toronto, the intense heat melting cars, killing motorists and leaving in its hellish centre the remains of two fuel trucks and at least four transport trucks.
Commercial truckers were already in the crosshairs of the OPP commissioner after a series of deadly summer crashes in Ontario culminated in what police called the “Armageddon” near Toronto, but a deeper dive into collision statistics suggests truckers are hardly public enemy No. 1.
Since 1995, when 182 people were killed in Ontario collisions involving commercial trucks, the number of licensed truckers has surged by 75 per cent but the number of truck-related deaths had plunged to 109 in 2014, a drop of 40 per cent, according to statistics from Ontario’s Transportation Ministry. While the ministry doesn’t have final data for 2015, 2016 or 2017, before Tuesday’s crash that killed at least three people, there had been 67 deaths this year involving truckers on the 400-series highways and rural roads that the OPP patrols, the force told Postmedia News.
At that rate, the death toll involving trucks would reach 81 by year’s end, though that excludes crashes in cities like Toronto and London where local police patrol the roads.
It’s not only the declining death count that’s at odds with the notion that truckers have grown more reckless.
From 2009 to 2014, truck drivers involved in fatal collisions were more than twice as likely to be driving properly as were car drivers, ministry figures show.
But those statistics weren’t mentioned by OPP Commissioner Vince Hawkes when, this week, he compared commercial trucks to “missiles” on Ontario’s highways and laid blame at the heavy foot of a trucker who allegedly was driving too fast Tuesday to safely stop as he approached flashing emergency lights and traffic slowed by an earlier, smaller collision, his trailer setting off a 14-vehicle crash.
“It’s a miracle we don’t have 25 bodies down there,” Hawkes said.
Later, he said a growing number of truckers are distracted when they drive. “Unfortunately, this is what we see time and time again and ... the trend is getting worse,” Hawkes said.
His stern words came less than a week after he announced OPP had charged three truckers who caused three summer crashed that killed six people.
“This series of horrific collisions is driver inattention at its worst and the most tragic reminder in recent history of the tremendous toll on the lives of innocent citizens when commercial transport truck drivers are not paying full attention to the road,” Hawkes said. “We are putting drivers on notice.”
While Ontario issues 100-page reports each year that scrutinize collision data in almost every conceivable way, Hawkes last week only cited two statistics about trucks that left the impression truckers are responsible for more than their fair share of death on Ontario roads. But a review of the ministry data from the last 22 years points to the opposite conclusion: that truckers are killing fewer people on Ontario roads and that their share of blame is smaller than that of other motorists.
The three summer collisions occurred in an eight-day stretch and its victims included a 14-year-old Kyle Brundritt and his mom, Lacie Brundritt, 42, of Amherstburg.
The images place truckers in the middle of disaster, but those images don’t reflect the safety record of commercial drivers, said Stephen Laskowski, the president of the Ontario Trucking Association.
The Ontario Safety League, which advocates for traffic safety, is calling on the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario to conduct a review of deaths on 400-series highways involving both commercial and private vehicles.