Today, American Trucking Associations officials expressed appreciation to the millions of professional truck drivers, dispatchers, technicians and other members of the trucking industry for their commitment to improving highway safety.
“June is National Safety Month, and as a safety-first industry, the many hard-working dedicated members of the trucking industry deserve to be commended for their efforts to make our roads safer,” said ATA President and CEO Bill Graves. “Our industry spends more than $7 billion annually on safety-related training, technology and equipment – and that investment is paying off in a big way.”
Since 2004, truck-involved fatal crashes are down 21% and since the industry was economically deregulated in 1980, those crashes are down 32% and the crash rate per 100 million miles has been cut an astonishing 74%.
“Our industry is benefitting from improvements in technology, but also from the hard work and dedication of our professional drivers,” said ATA Chairman Pat Thomas, senior vice president of state government relations, UPS Inc. “Advances in active safety technology and other devices have benefits, which is why our industry has been voluntarily investing in such systems. However, the most important safety investment our industry makes is in the men and women behind the wheel.”
“ATA has been at the forefront of pushing for common-sense rules to improve safety,” said ATA First Vice Chairman Kevin Burch, president of Jet Express Inc. “From pushing for the drug and alcohol clearinghouse rule and a mandate for electronic logging devices to calling on states to reduce speed limits and for a requirement for commercial vehicles to be electronically speed limited, ATA believes strong, data-supported rules will help us improve highway safety even more in the future.”
“Between ATA’s advocacy efforts and the efforts of our drivers, dispatchers, technicians and others every day, trucking is working hard to make our highways safer for all motorists,” Graves said.
