Why California Truck Accidents Are So Deadly

Why California Truck Accidents Are So Deadly

Of the 4,749 people killed on California streets and highways in 2008, only 304 died in accidents involving heavy trucks such as tractor-trailers and large trucks called single-unit trucks such as those used to haul soil, road construction debris and other heavy materials. That percentage may seem small compared to the tragedy of nearly 4,800 killed in California that year, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the dangers of these big rigs sharing the road with motorcycles, passenger cars and other small personal vehicles.

Why are California truck accidents so deadly? Several factors combine to make these accidents more likely to result in fatalities than accidents involving other types of vehicles are. The first, and perhaps most important, factor is physics. Trucks weighing tens of thousands of pounds take longer to accelerate to highway speeds and much longer to slow down. Tractor-trailers weigh up to 80,000 pounds when fully (and legally) loaded. If one of these traveling at any speed strikes a vehicle weighing 2,600 pounds, such as a passenger vehicle, you don't have to be a physics student to understand the results will be disastrous for the occupants of the smaller vehicle. To paraphrase Newton's Second Law of Motion, F = ma, or Force = mass times acceleration, any object weighing 50,000 or more pounds traveling at 40 or more miles per hour creates a fearsome amount of force released in all sorts of unpleasant and unpredictable ways when it collides with another object.

The second reason California truck accidents are so deadly is that, for truck drivers and trucking companies, time is money, and the more time they spend on the road, the more money they can make. The law states that truck drivers may not drive more than 11 continuous hours or drive 14 hours after beginning a duty shift without taking at least a 10-hour break. There are other restrictions regarding how many hours they can drive in a week. That sounds reasonable. However, a "restart" provision in trucking laws allows a driver to log up to 77 hours behind the wheel in a 7-day period or 88 hours in 8 days under certain conditions, which isn't reasonable at all. This leads to fatigued drivers, slow reaction times and deadly California truck accidents caused by impaired driver perception and reflexes. These rules are currently under review by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, and we should expect a ruling by July 2011.

There are many other reasons why California truck accidents are so deadly, such as drivers impaired by drugs or alcohol, talking and texting on cell phones, drivers without proper training and experience, poorly maintained trucks, the sheer volume of traffic on California streets and highways, etc. However, most of these reasons either directly or indirectly lead back to the first and second reasons in one way or another. These vehicles are massive and outweigh everything else on the road. An object traveling at 55 mph travels 81 feet every second. If anything impairs a truck driver's reaction time, even for a fraction of a second, the chances of a deadly California truck accident occurring are much higher. The laws of physics govern the world we live in and the roads on which we travel. Sir Isaac Newton knew this without ever seeing a large truck or the devastating aftermath of a California truck accident.

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