I respect the need for safety campaigns. There is some really crappy driving out there, and good on the cops for putting a stop to it.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance hosts a number of these things throughout the year. Operation Safe Driver Week was held in July, and the results were just released. Most media outlets will just report the results, some focusing on the big bad scary trucks that were targeted, and then move on without another thought.
Not Land Line. What picture of highway safety do the results really paint?
Here’s the short version of the results. During that week, there were 11,448 traffic stops of trucks and passenger vehicles engaging in unsafe driving. That resulted in a total of 4,494 tickets and 5,756 warnings. That breaks down to 2,634 tickets and 4,592 warnings to trucks and 1,860 tickets and 1,164 warnings to passenger vehicles.
That’s a lot of numbers coming at you really fast.
Let me highlight a couple of things that stand out to me.
- Truck drivers received more warnings than tickets.
- Passenger vehicle drivers received more tickets than warnings.
That’s clue No. 1 as to what group of drivers are the real problem on the roads.
Moving on, let’s look at speeding citations and warnings. CVSA’s press release points out that speeding was the focus of this year’s Operation Safe Driver Week.
Data backs up the need for this sort of crackdown with speeding going crazy since the pandemic shut everything down in 2020, turning highways into the U.S. version of Germany’s Autobahn for some drivers.
There were a total 2,008 tickets and 2,200 warnings issued for speeding. Now, let’s break it down by vehicle type. Truck drivers received 715 tickets and 1,575 warnings for speeding. Passenger vehicle drivers received 1,293 tickets and 625 warnings.
Let’s throw some fast and loose math on these numbers.
- Passenger vehicle drivers racked up 64% of the speeding tickets issued and only 28% of the warnings.
- Truck drivers, on the other hand, had 36% of the speeding tickets and 72% of the warnings.
One unfortunate thing about these stats is that we don’t know what the speeding tickets were for, meaning were they 5-10 mph over, 11-15 mph, etc. We do know that trucks are not to be cited for 1-5 mph over. So one could logically guess that warnings to truck drivers for 1-5 mph over accounted for the bulk of the warnings. But, let’s move on.
Warnings are for when you’ve screwed up but not badly enough to warrant a ticket. Operation Safe Driver results show passenger vehicle drivers got nailed with a citation 67% of the time when stopped for speeding. Truck drivers were hit with tickets only 31% of the time.
Another fact about trucks speeding is that it is more common in lower-speed-limit areas – thanks to electronic logs and speed-limited trucks.
The reality these results show is that there is already a speed differential out there on the roads with passenger vehicles routinely driving faster than trucks, and now we see, getting ticketed for that.
Trucks aren’t the problem children on the highways. It’s passenger cars.
These are the facts we need to drive home when battling a speed limiter mandate. While they are fresh on your mind, head over to FightingForTruckers.com. Shoot a quick email to your lawmakers telling them to support the DRIVE Act (S2671 in the Senate and HR3039 in the House), which would prevent the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from pursuing a mandate. LL
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