Should trucks have emergency brakes?

Crash sparks call for safety feature

Change may soon catch up with Ontario’s trucking industry.

Last week’s deadly 14-vehicle Hwy. 400 crash, near Bradford — in which two fuel tanker trucks acted as “bombs on wheels” — has triggered calls for the mandatory installation of emergency braking systems for all new trucks exceeding 3,500 kilograms, as the European Union did in 2012.

“I’ve seen the system directly and I’m really quite impressed with it,” said Brian Patterson, the president of the Ontario Safety League, who has called for a coroner’s inquest into the Hwy. 400 crash which claimed three lives.

“So, I would say there’s a good idea and what has delayed it’s adoption? Because it was on full display for at least the last four or five years at the trucking shows (in Ontario) and the (arguments) are pretty compelling.”

The collision alert and automatic emergency braking systems (which go under various names) are already appearing on passenger vehicles, and use radar, lasers and cameras that enable the driver to see as much as 200 metres in front and provide alerts about upcoming obstacles. If a driver fails to act, the vehicle will slow or stop.

“We’re still in the infancy of it,” said Marco Beghetto, spokesman for the Ontario Trucking Association (OTA).

“In the commercial vehicle market it’s starting to make some inroads. There really still isn’t a lot of market penetration. I will say that anecdotally from manufacturers that I’ve talked to that offer it on their systems, that some of the trucking companies that have been piloting it have seen pretty impressive results,” added Beghetto.

“I believe I was told from a manufacturer that one trucking company reported a reduction in rear end collisions by as much as 70 per cent,” he said. “The OTA, as far as we’re concerned, everything is on the table. We have never opposed safety technology where it makes sense, and where it’s proven to work, particularly in Canadian environments.”

Beghetto says the OTA will be part of a working group looking at truck enforcement and highway safety with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and the OPP in early December in Toronto.

Last week’s crash came after the OPP issued warnings about the increase in dangerous collisions involving transport trucks, saying officers responded to 5,000 collisions this year that led to 67 fatalities.

“For me that was the last straw,” said Patterson of the tragic accident. “When you take the major organizations that have spent a significant amount of time focused road safety, I think we’re all shellshocked that we can’t seem to turn this tide.”

OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt described the deadly 400 accident as “one of the worst in terms of absolute carnage and destruction” in an interview with Postmedia last week.

Police said the driver of a transport truck last Tuesday night slammed into the back of another large truck stopped in a queue of traffic for an accident farther down the road.

“There’s all sorts of technology out there,” said Schmidt.

In addition to preventing accidents like last week’s horrific crash on Hwy. 400, emergency brakes could potentially save lives in terrorist attacks.

Terrorists have turned trucks into weapons — as witnessed most recently by last Tuesday’s attack on a New York bike path that killed eight people and injured a dozen others.

An investigation by a German newspaper and two radio stations found that the death toll from a 2016 semi-trailer attack on a Berlin Christmas market that left 12 people dead could have been much worse had the automatic braking system not stopped the vehicle after 70 metres