Analysis: How ELDs Could Cut the High Cost of ‘Crash Harm’
Crash harm costs in six Oregon truck crash ‘hot spots.’
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Crash harm costs in six Oregon truck crash ‘hot spots.’
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A pilot study by Oregon State University illustrates the high economic cost of having too few safe places for commercial truck drivers to park and rest — but an indirect solution may be on the horizon.
Over a seven-year period on one 290-mile stretch of highway alone, at-fault truck crashes resulted in approximately $75 million in economic costs of “crash harm,” according to research conducted by the OSU College of Engineering for the Oregon Department of Transportation.
Crash harm is defined as a “measure of the combined human and material losses from traffic crashes based on economic valuation.”
“Current crash data collection forms don’t have an explicit section for truck-parking-related crashes, but we can operate under the assumption that specific types of at-fault truck crashes, such as those due to fatigue, may be the result of inadequate parking,” said the study’s lead author, Salvador Hernandez, a transportation safety and logistics researcher at OSU.
Hernandez and his team analyzed Oregon’s portion of U.S. Highway 97, which runs the entire north-south distance of the state along the eastern slope of the Cascade Range.
“Around the country, commercial drivers are often unable to find safe and adequate parking to meet hours-of-service regulations,” Hernandez said. “This holds true in Oregon, where rest areas and truck stops in high-use corridors have a demand for truck parking that exceeds capacity. That means an inherent safety concern for all highway users, primarily due to trucks parking in undesignated areas or drivers exceeding the rules to find a place to park.”
Researchers looked at what other states were doing in response to the parking issue, surveyed more than 200 truck drivers, assessed current and future parking demand on Highway 97, and used historical crash data to identify trends and hot spots and to estimate crash …Read the rest of this story
