Massachusetts Truck Safety Report

  Fatigue is the crash factor nobody photographs. Federal law has tried to control it for decades, with mixed results. A blown tire leaves debris on the road. A jackknife leaves skid marks. A driver who has been awake too long leaves almost nothing behind, except a crash that did not need to happen. That is what makes fatigue cases frustrating and, honestly, a little maddening. The evidence is not lying in the breakdown lane. It is in a logbook and a set of federal rules. So it is worth knowing what those rules actually require. What a trucker is and is not allowed to do For a driver hauling freight across state lines, the federal hours-of-service limits are fairly specific: ·          After ten straight hours off duty, a driver can drive up to eleven hours. ·          All of that driving has to fit inside a fourteen-hour window from the time the driver clocks in. Loading delays and traffic ...

  Serious truck crashes are not scattered evenly across the state. They follow the freight, and the freight follows a short list of roads. Anyone who drives Massachusetts for a living can tell you where the trucks stack up. It is not a mystery. Big-rig crashes cluster in the same places year after year, and once you know what to look for, the pattern is hard to miss. I have spent a long time working these cases. The location of a crash tells me a lot before I read a single page of the file. Here is where the serious ones tend to happen, and a little about why. The Pike and the Boston tunnels The Massachusetts Turnpike feeds straight into the Ted Williams Tunnel, and Interstate 93 dives under downtown through the O'Neill Tunnel. Tunnels are a bad place for a heavy truck to make a mistake. The lanes are tight, the light changes fast, and there is no shoulder to limp onto when something goes wrong. A truck that drifts or brakes late in there does not have room to recover, and ...

In an ordinary car crash you deal with one other driver. In a truck crash , the list of people who may owe you something is usually longer than you would expect. When two passenger cars collide, the claim is relatively simple: one driver, one insurance policy, one set of facts. Commercial truck crashes almost never work that way. The moment a tractor-trailer, box truck, or tanker is involved, the question of who is responsible opens up, and the answer often reaches several companies that were nowhere near the scene. Understanding that difference matters, because in a serious truck crash the driver's own insurance is frequently the smallest piece of the picture. The parties behind the driver are where the real responsibility, and the real coverage, tend to sit. The driver The driver is the obvious starting point. Speeding, following too closely, distraction, fatigue, or failing to check a blind spot before a lane change can all establish the driver's negligence. But a dr...