Recently, there has been a headline in the trucking media that says truck driver fatalities are on the rise. This headline just adds fuel to the notion that electronic logs (ELD) caused this.
After reading the comments from people where these articles were shared, I noticed many people with the opinion that in fact ELD’s did cause the rise in truck driver fatalities.
READ BEYOND THE HEADLINES
If these people who commented had read the articles they would have found out that there is much more to this. The real story was there were less fatalities per mile traveled by large trucks.
Here is the rest of the story taken right out of the story published in Landline Magazine...
“Per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, traffic fatalities decreased by 3.4% from 1.17 to 1.13. The decrease was not a result of less driving. VMT increased by 0.3% in 2018 compared with 2017.”
I would also question how many more commercial drivers there was in the year 2017.
The report also stated that pedestrian fatalities were up 3.4% and cyclists deaths were up by 6.3% which is the highest since 1990. Is this because there are more pedestrians and cyclists today?
I would be willing to bet there are more crashes involving cars with 17-inch diameter wheels in the year 2019 than there was back in 1975. This would make quite a headline because cars did not use 17” diameter wheels in 1975.
In the end, it is important to know the whole story before forming a knee jerk reaction without all of the facts.
Below is a link to the entire article:
https://landline.media/truck-fatalities-highest-in-30-years-in-first-full-year-of-eld-mandate/
And an Additional Article:
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-history/2015/04/26/auto-traffic-history-detroit/26312107/