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Trucking Headlines
Volvo reveals BeeVan concept truck
By Coy O'Neal
The BeeVan's driver would sit in the center of the cab with 180 degrees of visibility.
At this year’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Volvo Trucks North America entered a one-quarter-scale model of its "BeeVan" concept truck as part of the Michelin Challenge design competition.
Instead of the traditional left-side driver’s seat, the BeeVan puts the driver in the front and center of the cab, in what Volvo’s designers call the “full-view driver position.” The BeeVan’s windshield arcs completely around the driver for 180 degrees of uninterrupted visibility. Remote vision cameras are designed to eliminate blind spots.
Two radiators are placed at the base of the A-pillar/dash transitions to enhance engine cooling. Air is directed from the wraparound grille through the radiators and exits through the roof. The heat transferred from the radiator to the air is never in contact with the engine. The direct airflow through the traditional grille opening reduces drag and helps cool the engine.
The exterior design of the BeeVan features a door that slides back, instead of opening outward. As the door slides open, the driver’s seat moves rearward and rotates toward the driver for easy access. Hidden access steps slide out to greet the driver, then retract when not in use.
The interior cab design includes sleeper berths and a dinette table. Dual armrest consoles place an array of advanced technologies at the driver’s fingertips, including lane trackers, vehicle proximity sensors and driver drowsiness detectors.
An array of sensors would be controlled from the driver's armrests.
Interstate 70 in Kingdom City, Mo., where Dorris Edwards, 62, was killed in 2004 when an 18-wheeler hit her Jeep Cherokee.
By Stephen Labaton
WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 — As Dorris Edwards slowed for traffic near Kingdom City, Mo., on her way home from a Thanksgiving trip in 2004, an 18-wheeler slammed into her Jeep Cherokee. The truck crushed the sport-utility vehicle and shoved it down an embankment off Interstate 70. Ms. Edwards, 62, was killed. The truck driver accepted blame for the accident, and Ms. Edwards’s family filed a lawsuit against the driver and the trucking company.
In the course of pursuing its case, the family broached a larger issue: whether the Bush administration’s decision to reject tighter industry regulation and instead reduce what officials viewed as cumbersome rules permitted a poorly trained trucker to stay behind the wheel, alone, instead of resting after a long day of driving.
After intense lobbying by the politically powerful trucking industry, regulators a year earlier had rejected proposals to tighten drivers’ hours and instead did the opposite, relaxing the rules on how long truckers could be on the road. That allowed the driver who hit Ms. Edwards to work in the cab nearly 12 hours, 8 of them driving nonstop, which he later acknowledged had tired him.
Government officials had also turned down repeated requests from insurers and safety groups for more rigorous training for new drivers. The driver in the fatal accident was a rookie on his first cross-country trip; his instructor, a 22-year-old with just a year of trucking experience, had been sleeping in a berth behind the cab much of the way.
Federal officials, while declining to comment about the Edwards accident, have dismissed the assertion that deregulation has reduced safety and have maintained that in fact it has helped, though the Edwards family and many other victims of accidents have come to the opposite conclusion.
In loosening the standards, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was fulfilling President Bush’s broader pledge to free industry of what it considered cumbersome rules. In the last six years, the White House has embarked on the boldest strategy of deregulation in more than a generation. Largely unchecked by the Republican-led Congress, federal agencies, often led by former industry officials, have methodically reduced what they see as inefficient, outdated regulations and have delayed enforcement of others. The Bush administration says those efforts have produced huge savings for businesses and consumers.
Those actions, though, have provoked fierce debate about their benefits and risks. The federal government’s oversight of the trucking industry is a case study of deregulation, as well as the difficulty of determining an exact calculus of its consequences. Though Ms. Edwards’s family and the industry disagree on whether the motor carrier agency’s actions contributed to her death, her accident illuminates crucial issues in regulating America’s most treacherous industry, as measured by overall deaths and injuries from truck accidents.
The loosened standards, supporters say, have made it faster and cheaper to move goods across the country. They also say the changes promote safety; without longer work hours, the industry would be forced to put more drivers with little experience behind the wheel. Regulators and industry officials point out that the death toll of truck-related accidents — about 5,000 annually — has not increased, while the fatality rate, the number of deaths per miles traveled, has continued a long decline. The number of annual injuries has also been dropping slowly, falling to 114,000 last year.
“This administration has done a good job, and the agency has done a good job, in advancing safety issues in a manner that takes into account all the important factors of our industry,” said the top lobbyist for the American Trucking Associations, Timothy P. Lynch.
But advocates of tighter rules say the administration’s record of loosening standards endangers motorists. The fatality rate for truck-related accidents remains nearly double that involving only cars, safety and insurance groups say. They note that weakening the rules has reversed a course set by the Clinton administration and has resulted in the federal government repeatedly missing its own targets for reducing the death rate.
Ron Nixon contributed reporting. Background Checks, Fees Considered a Burden on Drivers
by Sean McNally
Senior Reporter
Five years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the U.S. trucking industry spent 2006 addressing another proposed round of federal background-check requirements.
The Department of Homeland Security issued its long-awaited proposal for a single identification card for port workers, but Congress saw the program as potentially disruptive and costly to truck drivers and took up legislation that would ease costs and requirements on truckers.
DHS began name-based checks for nearly 725,000 port workers, including truck drivers, as part of the rollout of its Transportation Worker Identification Credential program in April, officials with the department announced.
The name-based checks began about a month before the agency published its full proposal for the TWIC program. The checks were meant to help sort out potential risks, and “workers who we determine pose a security risk will be denied access to our nation’s ports,” DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said.
What is ITS?
ITS improves transportation safety and mobility and enhances productivity through the use of advanced communications technologies.
Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) encompass a broad range of wireless and wire line communications-based information and electronics technologies. When integrated into the transportation system's infrastructure, and in vehicles themselves, these technologies relieve congestion, improve safety and enhance American productivity.
ITS is made up of 16 types of technology based systems. These systems are divided into intelligent infrastructure systems and intelligent vehicle systems. To learn more about these systems and how they can be applied, as well as the costs and benefits of these systems, please visit the ITS Applications Overview Web Site. ITS Applications Overview Web Site.
For more information about ITS please visit:
About the Federal ITS Program
http://www.its.dot.gov/about.htm Frequently Asked Questions http://www.its.dot.gov/faqs.htm
Celebrating 50 Years: The Eisenhower Interstate System
 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/homepage.cfm
EOBRs are appropriate and reflect state-of-the-art communication and information management technologies.” The rulemaking also will consider the potential benefits and costs of requiring motor carriers to install and use EOBWhite House clears onboard recorder proposal
By Avery Vise
The White House Office of Management and Budget on Dec. 21 approved the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s long-awaited proposal regarding use of electronic onboard recorders (EOBRs) for compliance with hour-of-service regulations. The action clears the notice of proposed rulemaking for publication in the Federal Register.
According to FMCSA’s latest regulatory agenda, which was released earlier this month, the agency is proposing to incorporate new performance standards for EOBRs to “help ensure that performance standards for Rs and evaluate alternative approaches, including mandating EOBRs industrywide, limiting the requirement to motor carriers with certain characteristics and allowing use of EOBRs to remain voluntary.
It's unclear when FMCSA will publish the EOBR proposal. Federal agencies typically publish proposed and final regulations within a few days of OMB clearance, but FMCSA recently has not always acted so promptly. For example, OMB cleared a final rule concerning supporting documents for driver logs on Sept. 14, but FMCSA still hasn’t published the rule.
Administrator John Hill has said that he has delayed issuing the supporting documents rule to ensure that field personnel were fully trained on it and that the rule will be applied consistently. Now that OMB has cleared both the supporting documents rule and the EOBR proposal, FMCSA might publish them simultaneously since they both are aimed at enhancing compliance with hours-of service regulations.
FMCSA launched rulemaking efforts on EOBRs in September 2004, a few weeks after a federal appeals court ordered the agency to reconsider its hours-of-service regulations. Although the court’s ruling technically rested only on the agency’s failure to consider driver health as ordered by Congress, judges faulted FMCSA for failing to even consider mandating EOBRs.
Want to be an owner operator? Check out the Partners in Business website for valuable information It can be funny, interesting, or exciting. Please keep it clean and it might get published here.
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