As an attorney handling truck accident cases in the United States, I have represented truck accident victims and their families for a variety of reasons. In this article, I will describe some of the causes of truck accidents, starting with systemic causes and moving to more individualized causes.

Equipment problems.

As long as you have 80,000 pounds racing down a highway at 80 miles per hour on 18 wheels, there’s no room for error. And yet mistakes happen, often with fatal effects. Here are some recurring causes:

Brakes — Modern trucks must have automatic lash adjusters to take up slack when pads wear or drums expand. Mechanics must be trained to maintain them and drivers should never attempt to manually adjust them. Many older trucks still have manual slack adjusters, which need to be checked, or the brakes can fail, especially when a truck is going downhill and the brake drums expand as friction increases.

Overload — A truck can be dangerously overloaded, affecting its handling. If a tanker truck lacks proper guarding, it can be subject to massive momentum forces when it brakes suddenly, as thousands of gallons being spilled can cause the driver to lose control.

instability — Trucks can also lose stability when braking or turning, and then roll over or lose control.

In fact, that very topic has been in the news lately. About three-quarters of the large tractor-trailers on the road now lack rollover and stability control systems, which have been shown to prevent crashes and save lives. Both the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration call for such systems to become mandatory equipment. While many large fleet owners support the move, some independent drivers and their organizations find the costs burdensome. And no one is even talking about the mandatory modernization of trucks already on the road.

Lack of follow-up for trucking bad actors

How do equipment failures occur? They can usually be attributed to poor management and inconsistent maintenance, often exacerbated by inattention or even poor driving. Surprisingly, however, there is still no national database that tracks patterns of safety violations among trucking company officials, supervisors, and other influential people. So the people who have run trucking companies accused of security breaches can simply shut down one company and start another, bringing with them all the bad practices but none of the security, surveillance, or censorship violations they deserve.

In July 2011, a committee of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration recommended that the FMCSA initiate such a database to keep our highways safer.

human errors

Driving while tired it is a common factor in fatal truck and commercial vehicle accidents. Although the FMCSA hours of service rule requires truck drivers to take a sleep break after 11 hours of driving, many truckers prefer to drive at night, when the roads are less crowded and, of course, people are tired at night. That is our biology. Please note that the FMCSA HOS rule allows commercial drivers to reset their weekly limit by taking a 34-hour break. But that reduces profits, so drivers may try to cut corners.

In June 2011, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance organized Roadcheck 2011, a three-day enforcement and education campaign that mobilized nearly 8,000 inspectors to stop more than 70,000 trucks and buses at 2,550 locations across the US. overall showed some improvements over previous years, more than half of the drivers pulled off the road were cited for hours-of-service violations.

distracted driving is another common cause of truck accidents. Probably the most infamous distracted trucker was the one who killed a young mother near Buffalo, New York, in January 2010, because she was distracted by watching pornography on her laptop while she was driving. (That trucker was also found to be severely sleep deprived, which supports my last point.)

But talking and texting on a cell phone are also common distractions, even though dozens of state and federal laws restrict or prohibit both.

driving under the influence It causes accidents in all vehicles. Truckers are no exception, although their legal BAC limit is .04%, half that of a non-commercial driver. Many use stimulants to help stay awake during long drives, but all drugs cloud judgment and can lead to unsafe driving.

Here are some of the underlying causes of truck accidents, along with some of the trucking regulations and compliance that are now being discussed. If you would like to discuss your own truck accident case, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or (419) 243-1011.