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Trapped Under Trucks

propublica.org

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Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#51

Post by shakow »

robgibbons wrote: post #43
shakow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without putting blame anywhere and independently of who has the right of way, don't you just have your preservation instinct kicking in telling you that just giving a bit of brakes is not a bad idea, and that the risk/gain ratio of losing 10 seconds of your day vs. getting killed is not worth it?

In motorcycle safety courses, you're taught to never assume that other drivers can see you, in fact you are encouraged to operate as if you're invisible, and ride accordingly. Growing up, I was told that it's better to be alive than to be "right" as it pertains to right-of-way. You can either insist on continuing because it's your right, or you can brake early assuming they're going to cut you off.

Agreed. An even from a more trivial perspective, I overwhelmingly prefer to lose my right of way and 3' of my day rather than fork out thousands in body job on my car.

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#52

Post by renewiltord »

Fortunately, if you avoided listening to environmentalists, transit advocates, and people with children and bought a high ride-height vehicle like a Dodge Ram 1500, your vehicle will be tall enough to actually contact the truck or trailer without a decapitation!

Pickups and SUVs are way safer, guys. Up to you what you do with the information.

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#53

Post by bombcar »

renewiltord wrote: post #50
bombcar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think some of the trucking companies would do it just for publicity, if it was cheap enough. Then again, cars could all come with roll cages and five-point harnesses, and they don't, so there's some limit to safety equipment.

What exactly do you do with the publicity? You're a B2B company. I've never heard of someone calling up Safeway and asking if they use SafeGuards Trucking over RideHighOrDie Trucking. Literally zero incentive.

B2B companies have customers.

And two really big trucking companies are UPS and FedEx, along with Amazon, too. Walmart, also.

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#54

Post by mistercheph »

ethagknight wrote: post #38

>>It was a little after 7 p.m. and Ricardo Marcos was rolling through the darkness in his gray Hyundai Elantra. Marcos had spent a long day toiling as a mechanic at a trucking company in McAllen, Texas, a sunbaked city nestled right on the U.S.-Mexico border. Reading the opening story, it sounds like he fell asleep or wasn't paying attention. We will never know, but it's very sad no matter. It's also true, assuming h…

The purpose of the NHTSA and vehicle safety regulations broadly is not to litigate who is at fault in an accident and sentence them to death, it is to make traveling on the road by motor vehicle or bicycle or foot as safe as is feasible given costs and available technology and data about the nature of injuries in collisions. Most people most of the time are in control of their vehicles and are paying attention to the road. But every single person that drives a car will make a mistake, become distracted, suffer a mechanical failure, or become unavoidably implicated in the mistake of another road user.

Slamming into the back or coming through the side of a semi-trailer is not something that just happens to "dangerous drivers". It is something that can happen to anyone placed in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That said, the position of the regulators and trucking industry at present make sense, underride crash data indicates that the costs of proposed safety measures could be better spent improving other known road-safety issues with known or projected solutions. And the point that TFA is making is that NHTSA data is severely underreporting underride crash incidents in the sample that they investigated, making underride crash safety regulations worthwhile.

And the mass of the vehicle is really not the issue in this sort of collision. This type of collision would occur in the same exact way if the trailers weighed 1,000 lbs, the bottom of the trailer would shred through the windshield and decapitate the occupants. A better underride guard would turn an unknown number of fatal accidents into scary crashes that people walk away from unharmed.

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#55

Post by toast0 »

milkytron wrote: post #16
rnga1dco wrote: post #10

As the article mentions, there is collaborative documentary that was produced with this story. You can watch it, and I think most FRONTLINE documentaries free on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LyaWzOesXk

I watched this last night, and it's always interesting to people in business talk about the cost of saving lives. There was one point where the reporter was interviewing a guy from the ATA (American Trucking Associations) where the ATA person says that one lost life is too many. And this is very common across so many industries, safety first as they always say. But then as soon as you put a cost associated with savin…

> But then as soon as you put a cost associated with saving a life, the whole idea of safety first goes out the window. In this case, underrides are clearly avoidable and really don't cost that much to prevent. Retrofitted truck solutions are available, cheap, and easy to install.

There's a reasonable argument to not even bother with retrofitting. This has been a known issue for decades, just start building it into new trailers, and eventually the old trailers will age out and/or become uninsurable.

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#56

Post by jiveturkey »

This article is intentionally written to sidestep the victim driver's own responsibility. It's hard to underride into a truck if you're driving attentively.

That's not to say they are wrong, if the fix is as simple and as cheap as described. I do value the expose of the politics around the non-action, even if TFA has other faults.

Mandatory AEB (automatic emergency braking) systems should address it to some degree, albeit only in new cars. There's no reason we shouldn't do both.

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#57

Post by toss1 »

slt2021 wrote: post #44
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might see the truck edging out of a driveway and trust that they're going to properly yield right of way and not make themselves an obstacle. By the time I realize "my" mistake, I might not have enough distance to stop.

Do you want to be right or alive? Pick one

Yup

I remember my grandfather telling me long before I could drive:

"You don't want to be dead right."

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#58

Post by oh_sigh »

gambiting wrote: post #46
jffry wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is prohibiting truck transport on Sunday good for other road users? You'd be eliminating 14% of hours in the week, which means a corresponding higher density of trucks on non-Sunday days

Coming from countries where truck transport is not allowed on Sundays - it's great. Means that if you're going with your family somewhere on Sunday it's very quiet on the roads. Also awesome for long distance driving, always plan those for a Sunday and the traffic flows much smoother. As for the idea that it moves the traffic to other days - no it doesn't, because a lot of that traffic wouldn't be driving on Sunday a…

Perhaps traffic flows smoother because there is just less traffic altogether on Sunday. And anyway, who is operating these trucks that would be driving on Sunday if it was legal, but instead don't drive at all? If trucks aren't driving on Sunday anyway then there is little need to ban them.

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#59

Post by slt2021 »

toss1 wrote: post #57
slt2021 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to be right or alive? Pick one

Yup I remember my grandfather telling me long before I could drive: "You don't want to be dead right."

Similar wisdom about arguing with your wife: Do you want to be right or happy? /i

Re: Trapped Under Trucks

#60

Post by hobobaggins »

mistercheph wrote: post #54
ethagknight wrote: post #38

>>It was a little after 7 p.m. and Ricardo Marcos was rolling through the darkness in his gray Hyundai Elantra. Marcos had spent a long day toiling as a mechanic at a trucking company in McAllen, Texas, a sunbaked city nestled right on the U.S.-Mexico border. Reading the opening story, it sounds like he fell asleep or wasn't paying attention. We will never know, but it's very sad no matter. It's also true, assuming h…

The purpose of the NHTSA and vehicle safety regulations broadly is not to litigate who is at fault in an accident and sentence them to death, it is to make traveling on the road by motor vehicle or bicycle or foot as safe as is feasible given costs and available technology and data about the nature of injuries in collisions. Most people most of the time are in control of their vehicles and are paying attention to the…

> Slamming into the back or coming through the side of a semi-trailer is not something that just happens to "dangerous drivers". It is something that can happen to anyone placed in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's certainly an avoidable mistake, especially on an open highway where the trailer was 'edging slowly' out into traffic. Failing to avoid it results in danger. The article doesn't even mention extenuating circumstances such as a blind turn or something, but even if that were the case, the situation would simply require extra caution to successfully navigate the dangerous area.

"Dangerous" doesn't have to mean intentionally so or that the driver was reckless; the danger could simply be in lacking the experience to recognize the danger that exists.

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