By Judith Lee Stone

Every year in America over 5,000 people die in crashes involving big trucks. In fact, although big trucks are only 3 percent of the vehicles on the roads, they are responsible for more than 12 percent of the total deaths suffered each year from motor vehicle crashes. Even more frightening is the death toll of passenger vehicle occupants killed in their small cars, pickups, and vans when they tangle with big trucks: 22 percent of the deaths in these small passenger vehicles from collisions with other vehicles were the result of crashes with large trucks.

This means that your chances of survival in a crash with one of these much larger, heavier commercial vehicles are pretty slim. A breakdown of the more than 5000 deaths a year resulting from big truck crashes shows that 98 percent of the people who die are not in the trucks. Not surprisingly, in big truck-little car crashes, the people in the cars almost always are killed or seriously injured, but the truck drivers almost always survive and are often uninjured.

One of the most serious sources of truck crashes on our nationÕs roads are overworked, exhausted, sleep-deprived truck drivers repeatedly violating federal laws on how long they can drive and how much rest they have to take. These truck drivers are pushed every day beyond human endurance by dispatchers, shippers, and receivers who demand that they deliver freight on schedules that canÕt possibly be kept without staying awake for long hours, and violating federal regulations and speed limits.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to detect these widespread violations because truck drivers regularly falsify their paper logbooks that record how much time they spend on the road or asleep, or even about the routes they took to get where they are -- concealing any information that could be used by police or truck inspectors to determine how long they actually have been on duty.

But even without faked logbooks -- which truck drivers themselves call "comic books" -- current government rules on how long a driver can stay behind the wheel, how many hours a week can be driven, and how much off-duty rest time has to be taken, allow drivers to keep schedules that constantly deprive them of sleep and keep them rolling on the highway until they are a safety threat to themselves and everyone else around them.

For example, the current federal regulations permit a driver to pilot a big rig down the road for up to 10 hours straight and 16 hours in any 24-hour period, but take only 8 hours off-duty to try to sleep. This schedule is very dangerous, because drivers canÕt recover from this kind of stress with only 8 hours away from the wheel. Even worse, not only do drivers usually get far less than 8 hours of sleep -- often only 3 or 4 hours taken in a sleeper berth in the truck -- but keeping up this cycle of driving day after day means that drivers are often trying to sleep during the same time they were driving the day before. Not only are these drivers not getting enough sleep, but the quality of what little sleep they get is poor.

Many truck safety and sleep researchers suspect that a very large percentage of big truck crashes are not due just to actually falling asleep at the wheel, but to truck drivers being so exhausted and sleep-deprived that their attention to the critical job of guiding an 80,000 pound tractor-trailer down a highway at 70 miles-per-hour has been reduced to the point where losing control and having a crash is just a matter of time. Usually, police reports canÕt show whether truck driver fatigue was the cause of a crash, even when the driver actually fell asleep at the wheel. And there isnÕt any "test" for fatigue on the roadside for a truck driver who is severely sleep-deprived and survives the crash as there is for drug and alcohol use. Also, many truck drivers are well aware that they often operate their rigs with little sleep under their belts. When the crash inevitably happens, they regularly conceal the fact that they were very drowsy and lost control of their rigs, and instead blame the cause of the collision on the car drivers sharing the road with them. Sadly, these car drivers are often killed in a big truck crash and canÕt show that they werenÕt at fault.

Unfortunately, the federal government appears ready to make a bad situation even worse. Canada already allows truck drivers to drive for 13 hours straight and recent international trade agreements have increased the pressure on the U.S. to raise its truck driver hours of service limits to match Canadian rules. Moreover, the U.S. trucking industry wants to use even fewer drivers to increase its profitability. Also, by making legal what are now illegal driving practices, the federal government can reduce its enforcement responsibilities. As a result, the United States Department of Transportation is preparing a new regulation which probably will let truck drivers push their rigs for up to 12 or 13 hours straight instead of the current maximum of 10 continuous hours without a rest break. Despite more than 25 years of studies showing that truck drivers begin to suffer reduced alertness and performance after only 7 to 8 hours of driving, and have a higher risk of crashes, the federal government stands ready to increase the number of hours that truck drivers can pilot their big rigs down the highway!