Thwarting dangerous drivers
Moulton pitches legislation due to fatal N.H. crash
A bill that’s intended to keep dangerous drivers off the road and prevent horrific car crashes — like the New Hampshire wreck last year in which seven people died — moved forward on Wednesday.
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton’s legislation for all RMVs in the country to be immediately alerted whenever a driver has an infraction was included in the Moving Forward Act, which the House of Representatives passed 233-188.
The Salem Democrat introduced the Safe Drivers Act due in large part to last year’s tragic crash that killed seven motorcyclists from the Jarheads Motorcycle Club and revealed stunning deficiencies within the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.
The Massachusetts trucker charged in the crash had been arrested in Connecticut a month earlier and charged with an OUI. His license should have been suspended, but the Massachusetts RMV had failed to process out-of-state violations.
Five of the motorcyclists killed in the June crash were Marines. Moulton, a Marine who served four tours in Iraq, has said he was touched “quite personally” after the crash.
“If government used technology the rest of us take for granted, the seven patriots who died in the Jarheads Motorcycle crash would be alive today,” Moulton said in a statement. “Dangerous drivers should be taken off the road, but right now they could be in the car or truck next to you because Congress and state governments aren’t innovating. We deserve better than mail bins full of notices piling up in government offices, and passing this bill will help get us there.”
The bill is intended to create new ways for states to use existing grants to modernize their RMVs to better share data across state lines.
For instance, the bill would amend an existing grant so it could be used for new purposes — including linking highway safety databases with other databases within the state and with those of other states, and improving compatibility among state and national data systems.
The grants would help improve notifications, “To make them instantaneous and to do it across the country so an incident like this doesn’t occur,” Moulton said last year when introducing the bill.
In the wake of last year’s crash, the RMV reviewed out-of-state notifications and suspended thousands of driver’s licenses. The tragedy also led to the resignation of Registrar Erin Deveney and the firing of Thomas Bowes, director of the RMV’s Merit Rating Board.
The Moving Forward Act — which includes $1.5 trillion for infrastructure, schools, housing and more — now heads from the Democratic-controlled House to the Republicancontrolled Senate.