Regulating Trucks

When Atlanta residents Stephen and Susan Owings ate breakfast, prayed and said good-bye to their two college-age sons after Thanksgiving, they had no idea that only one of their sons would return for Christmas.

Nearly six years ago, on Dec. 1, 2002, 22-year-old Washington and Lee student Cullum Owings, a business major, died when a 70,000-pound tractor-railer driving 72 m.p.h., the equivalent of a car driving more than 300 m.p.h., slammed into his door.

“My rear-view mirror has turned into a time machine,” said
Stephen Owings. “Every now and then when I glance into it, I see my son Cullum backing out of our driveway, waving one last time as he pulls away. Then the truth comes crashing home again: I’m still here, and he’s not.”

Traffic halted just 10 minutes from the Washington and Lee campus in Lexington, Virginia. Pierce Owings, Cullum’s younger brother, remembers Cullum glancing into his mirror, then sharply swerving onto the highway’s median. He saved his brother’s life. But it was too late for him.

The tractor-trailer slammed into the driver’s side, trapping Cullum’s car against a stone embankment. Cullum lived just long enough for his brother to say good-bye.

After Cullum’s death, Stephen founded Road Safe America, a non-profit organization “working to make our highways safer by limiting the top speed of tractor-trailer trucks” and implementing “ a national rule that requires operational speed governors in trucks, limiting them to 68 miles an hour, with serious consequences for violators.”

Stephen Owings urged an audience at the National Press Club on June 16 to spread the word about this petition, which was proposed 21 months ago. Owings said 9,000 people have already died from truck-related deaths since he proposed the idea.
“By the time you go home tonight to have dinner with your families, 14 additional families will be mourning the loss of a loved one,” said Stephen Owings. “It’s a travesty that so many people die this way on our roadways every year.”

And Cullum’s is not the only death. Tractor-trailers weighing over 13 tons kill an estimated 5,000 people annually. 100,000 people are injured. Large trucks are involved in 300,000 accidents per year, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics.

One member in the audience asked if the regulation would apply to rural areas such as Montana and Wyoming. Owings argued that most tractor-trailer crashes happen in rural areas. “The statistics show that the majority of fatal crashes on highways occur in rurual areas,” said Owings. “Our son was killed in a rural area in Virginia.”

Regulating trucks’ speeds would have several advantages across the United States, Stephen Owings and his wife, Susan, argued.

“If you slow down a truck just 3 m.p.h., that truck will save 1,000 gallons of fuel and there are 2.5 million trucks in the United States,” said Owings. “The number of crashes that are their fault will be [reduced].”

Truck drivers are most often at fault when they drive too fast for road conditions, according to Owings.

“We see these big trucks going 80 m.p.h.; they need several football fields to stop,” said Owings. “Slowing them down and keeping them at a top speed of 68—the average speed on interstate highways—enables them to stop closer to the same distance as cars.”

The American Trucking Association petitioned the government to create a national speed limit of 65 m.p.h., because they argue that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

“It’s clearly a safety advantage. We would reduce the number and severity of crashes,” said Dave Osieck, ATA Vice President of Safety, Security and Operations. There’s a clear relationship between severity and speed. The faster a vehicle is driving, the more energy is involved.”

When trucks slow down, drivers have more time to react, Osieck argues. “When you slow trucks down, you give people more time to react to unexpected events,” said Osieck. “When you slow trucks down, their stopping distance decreases, and it’s a good thing for everybody. “

Other countries have already regulated their trucks’ speeds. Japan has set its speed limit to 56 m.p.h. and Canada’s is 65 m.p.h.

“In Australia alone, fatal crash involvement has dropped by a third since they began requiring [speed devices] on heavy trucks,” according to Owings.

David Parker, CEO of Covenant Transport, fully agrees with Stephen Owings’ plan, because it benefits his company, he said.

“I’m 100 percent for what Road Safe America is attempting to do. We’ve got very strong ethics in our company,” said Parker. “We’ve got our trucks governed at 65 mph, and if we reduce trucks to 60 mph that’s 5 million gallons of fuel [that is saved] a year.”

Melinda Zosh is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.

Melinda Zosh