Session 2b: Safety 1
What a difference a quarter-century makes: commercial
motor vehicle and driver
Deborah M. Freund, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA),
deborah.freund@dot.gov
Commercial vehicle transportation plays a huge role in the economy of the United States.
Trucking is a $ 6.235 B industry -- 67 % of freight (by weight) and 75 % of freight (by value)
moves by truck. Both the freight and passenger transportation industries are made up of small
firms -- about 90 percent of motor carriers operate fewer than 19 power units. Highway
vehicle crashes are the leading or second-leading cause of death from injury for people of all
age groups. Although commercial vehicles represent about 3 percent of registered vehicles
and 7 percent of vehicle miles traveled, they are involved in 12 percent of highway fatalities.
In the past 20 years, the highway motor freight and passenger industries have experienced
considerable structural change. In the freight industry, the most significant changes have
taken motor carriers from an industry comprised mainly of terminal-based less-than-truckload
operations to smaller, less centralized, and more demand-driven truckload operations. There
has also been an explosion in the number of motor carriers and numbers of vehicles operated
arising from removal of nearly all economic barriers to market entry; increased demand for
point-to-point transportation with higher reliability than other modes and multimodal land
transport could deliver. The highway passenger industry has also evolved to respond to
changes in customer demands.
During the same period, the legal and regulatory atmosphere has also evolved. Although the
foundations for motor carrier safety regulations were laid in 1935 legislation, it was not until
the Motor Carrier Act of 1984 that “commercial motor vehicle (CMV)” was defined. And, it
was only in 1986 that a Federal law was enacted to require consistent procedures for
licensing for drivers of the largest CMVs. The 1990s saw greatly increased legislative activity
that led to major changes in safety regulations concerning driver, vehicles, and motor carrier
oversight. The Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999 (MCSIA) established a new
operating administration, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), to
improve the Nation’s motor carrier safety program.
The approach of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency responsible for
developing and implementing national regulations to promote the safe operation of propertyand passenger-carrying highway vehicles, focuses on “3 Es (Education, Enforcement, and
Engineering) as well as the and the Driver, Vehicle, and Environment (in our world,
workplace/carrier environment) of the Haddon Matrix.
The earliest programs have now been in place for more than 20 years, and it is appropriate to
take a closer look at the results. This paper will summarize key laws and regulations
concerning new and in-use equipment requirements for vehicles, heavy-goods-vehicle
drivers, and motor carriers in the United States. In addition to describing the circumstances
under which those laws and regulations were developed and the specific safety gaps they
were intended to address, the paper will also discuss contemporaneous political and business
cycle influences. It will also provide a view toward the next evolutionary stages in
commercial vehicle safety technologies and commercial vehicle safety regulation.