Speed limiters — already installed on big trucks — will reduce crashes

We were devastated to read about the fatal truck crash in Colorado last month, and offer our deepest condolences to all the families affected. We pray that those injured will recover quickly and fully.

As parents who buried one son,Cullum,andalmostlostour other son, Pierce, because a truck driver was traveling too fast and failed to brake in time, we know the anger, sadness, regret, shock and so many other feelings with which those affected by this crash must now be coping.

As advocates to improve truck safety, however, we want to shine a light on a lifesaving technology that our nonprofit, Road Safe America, has been championing for years: heavy vehicle speed limiters. The required use of this capability, which has been standard in big rigs for several years, could have prevented or significantly reduced the violence of the Colorado truck crash where the driver likely suffered brake failure while traveling 85 mph.

While there are many safe motor carriers that voluntarily have their trucks’ speed limiters set at a maximum 65 mph, too many others do not. This cannot be allowed to continue. We need our lawmakers to pass legislation requiring the use of speed limiters on our heaviest trucks set at a maximum of 65 mph.

The difference of 10 or 20 mph at high speeds could be the difference between life or death for you or a loved one.

In fact, an 80,000-pound big rig colliding at 85 mph results in more force upon impact and travels an additional 29 feet per second than a tractor-trailer truck operating at 65 mph. Thus, it should not be surprising that Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) found that “speeding” was one of the driving behaviors that “had the most impact on CMV (Commercial Motor Vehicle) at-fault crashes,” and that “crashes with speed citations had a 170 percent greater injury/fatality risk per crash.”

Unfortunately, educating the public about the benefits of this technology has been difficult for several reasons.

For one, there is a small

contingent of truckers who use speed as a competitive advantage and have a financial interest in continuing their lawlessness. This loud minority of the trucking industry has been successful in advancing the erroneous notion that speed limiter requirements will result in increased crashes and traffic jams. This ignores the safety record of dozens of forward-thinking countries that have required heavy truck speed limiter settings since the 1990s. It also ignores the safety records and profitability of trucking companies here that voluntarily operate trucks throughout the country with their speed limiters set.

Secondly, fatal truck crashes don’t tend to capture the same attention as aviation-related deaths, which are fewer and less frequent. For instance, the tragic crash involving a Lion Air Boeing 737 aircraft was followed by a deluge of articles about the company, the plane, and the pilot; and politicians of all stripes called for Boeing to ground their Max 737s because of safety concerns. This is not to say that we care too much about plane crashes; on the contrary, it reveals just how little we care about truck crashes. The resulting deaths and injuries have become an accepted risk of moving freight.

Yet, we should not have to experience a devastating truck crash, like the one in Colorado and so many others, in order for the media to investigate the state of truck safety or identify a persistent truck safety problem. Nor should we accept inaction from anyone — lawmakers, trucking companies, or others — as it relates to using existing technology that is already in nearly all big rigs to prevent more highspeed tractor-trailer crashes.

Instead, we should be proactive and do what we should have done a long time ago: require that our largest trucks, that already have speed limiter technology, set it at a reasonable maximum of 65 mph.