Wednesday, November 08, 2006
If we're gonna keep on truckin', let's slow down
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
Now that the congressional midterm election is over and we have put all vitriol aside and are united as a nation once again, heh heh, let's talk highway safety.
Here is an issue all Virginians can get behind 100 percent. We want to feel safe driving the interstates, and in Southwest Virginia, we want in particular to feel safe driving Interstate 81.
We don't -- feel safe, that is; at least, we often do not.
We'd like to thin out the big rigs by piggy-backing more of them on rail cars, though we're worried that while this sounds appealing on a macro level, on the micro level -- specifically, between a proposed intermodal site at Elliston and wherever all of these trucks would be entering I-81 -- things might work out all wrong for anxious motorists.
To keep everyone on board, let's say we'll take the good but not the bad.
Even if more freight can be transferred eventually from highways to rails, we want the interstate to be safer sooner rather than later, and we want adequate capacity for anticipated increases in traffic volume in the future.
I may have lost some rail visionaries, here, but perhaps we all can agree that between now and a true rail solution to highway congestion, something will have to be done to allow all kinds of vehicular traffic to get along better.
We want I-81 to be as wide as it needs to be, but no wider: We want enough lanes to allow cars to pass trucks going uphill and trucks to pass cars going down. Surely everyone can agree to that.
Yet we don't want to turn a lovely stretch of roadway with mountain views into a nightmare of dehumanizing ugliness -- high concrete retaining walls to the right of us, Jersey barriers or steel crash barriers to the left -- or to add lanes that would tear up a lot of new terrain.
OK, now I'm hearing sighs of disgust from the roadbuilding pragmatists.
So I'm going to scamper back to the middle of the road and suggest we all get behind an idea to make the interstates safer without pouring concrete -- not safe enough, mind you, but safer until that day, as my daddy used to say, when our ship comes in, and we can have everything just the way we want it.
I say we stand foursquare behind a proposal to put governors on all large trucks to limit their speed to a maximum of 68 miles per hour.
The idea is born of death and grief. It is part of a project called Road Safe America that an Atlanta couple started after their older son died in a 2002 accident on I-81 in Rockbridge County.
Cullum Owings, a senior at Washington and Lee University, was returning to college after celebrating Thanksgiving with his family that year. His brother, Pierce, a W&L freshman, was with him. Traffic slowed to a stop. "A half mile behind them," their father, Steve, writes on the safety campaign's Web site (www.roadsafeamerica.org/), "a 70,000-pound truck was traveling 70 miles per hour on cruise control -- on the busiest traffic day of the year."
Cullum saw the truck coming in his rear-view mirror and tried to pull into the median, but the impact was inevitable. He died before rescuers pulled him from the wreckage, comforted in the end by his brother, who survived.
Heartbreaking.
All sad stories cannot end with some new law or regulation. I don't support every crusade launched by bereaved loved ones after a senseless death. But this effort makes sense.
The Owingses and a handful of trucking companies petitioned the federal government for a national rule that would require tractor-trailers to electronically limit their top speed to 65 mph. Recently, the American Trucking Association turned from opposing to supporting the initiative, and asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require truck manufacturers to put speed governors that could not be set higher than 68 mph on all large trucks.
On a macro level, industry and safety advocates see this as just common sense. On a micro level, I expect less than unanimous cheers. Time is money for truckers, and some carriers and independent drivers will fear losing some of both if the new rule is adopted.
Even some car drivers I've talked to have blanched. Some suspect this would be the start of lowering speeds for everyone, and they might be right. The trucking association has called for a maximum speed for all vehicles of no more than 65 mph, spokeswoman Tiffany Wlazlowski told me.
So, everyone won't be happy. I say go for it.
Trucks are not unsafe at any speed, but they are lethal at some. Let's ease down on the brakes a bit.
Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
