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Posted in Truck Accident Litigation Blog

The Large Truck Crash Causation Study

October 29th, 2007 by Dawn Mefford

The Large Truck Crash Causation Study (LTCCS) released in 2006 is based on a three-year data collection project conducted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).  In its inception, it was to be an unprecedented national study of large trucking accidents, focusing on obtaining information necessary to implement effective countermeasures to reduce the occurrence and severity of these crashes. 

The overall purpose of the LTCCS is to determine why large truck crashes happen in an effort to prevent future collisions.  To this end, the study considered a number of different variables.  One of the most important variables is referred to as the critical event, which describes the action or event that put the vehicles on a course that made collisions unavoidable.  The critical event was assigned to the vehicle that took the action that made the crash inevitable.  The LTCCS yielded three major types of critical events that are assigned to trucks: (1) 32 percent of large trucks ran out of the travel lane, either into another lane or off the road; (2) 29 percent of large trucks lost control due to traveling too fast for conditions, cargo shift, vehicle systems failure, etc.; and (3) 22 percent collided with the rear end of another vehicle in the truck’s travel lane.

Another important variable is referred to as the critical reason, which describes the immediate cause for the critical event (i.e., that failure leading to the critical event).  The critical reason is assigned to the vehicle coded with the critical event in the crash.  The critical reason is broken down into three main categories: driver error (87 percent), vehicle failure (10 percent), or environmental conditions (3 percent).  These three main categories can be broken down into 19 specific factors leading to the critical reason. Of the 19 major factors considered, 15 were truck-driver errors.  When the critical reason was the result of truck-driver error, 23 percent involved a driver who was traveling too fast for the conditions.  When the critical reason was the result of vehicle failure, 29 percent involved brake problems, with tire problems claiming 6 percent and cargo shift claiming 4 percent. 

While these statistics do not answer all of the questions surrounding large truck accidents, one thing is certain—most collisions are preventable.  Hopefully, state legislatures and trucking companies will learn from the LTCCS and implement countermeasures to decrease the severity and occurrences of collisions. The greatest impact of the LTCCS may be that it is the beginning of change in federal highway safety databases. Currently, all major national crash databases focus on the collection of descriptive data. NHTSA, however, has begun a National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Study (NMVCCS) that is modeled on the LTCCS. The NMVCCS study will collect crash causation data on over 1,000 crashes each year involving light vehicles—cars, pickup trucks, vans, and sports utility vehicles.

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