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We've all heard all our lives that speed kills and that's certainly true in the trucking context.
One of the major causes of major truck crashes is speed.
Now, professional tractor trailer drivers are trained to know the distance required to stop at various speeds.
They're trained to know the distance at which they need to follow other vehicles at different speeds.
Trucking companies are required to schedule deliveries so that
they can be accomplished legally and following the speed limits in each place that they pass through.
Too often though, we find that they're under pressure from shippers, employers to complete runs in times that cannot be done.
without breaking either the hours of service rules or the speed limits or both.
This is especially a problem in bad weather.
The federal motor carrier safety regulations require that truck drivers operate with extreme caution in hazardous weather including rain snow etc.
that affects visibility or traction.
The commercial driver's license manual of every state tell drivers that they need to slow down by one-third in heavy rain.
We've had cases where truckers pushed on at 70 miles an hour in pouring rain when they should have slowed down by one-third,
basically from 70 to 47, in order to be safe in that context.
We also see cases where truckers under pressure to make a delivery, drive at the day time posted speed or faster at night and overdrive their headlights.
So what may be a legal speed for a car, it's not a safe speed for a truck.
We've had cases were truckers drove at 70 miles an hour, at night, in the rain, on cruise control, over driving their headlights,
while deeply fatigued and ran over innocent people killing or causing serious injury.
The type of vehicle makes a difference too, for example,
a concrete mixer truck has a high and shifting center of gravity so that it can overturn making a right turn at 16 miles per hour.
and if the truck driver is not trained on the specific characteristics of that type of vehicle
a catastrophe can occur. We had a case where a cement truck driver was not trained,
made a turn at 25 five miles an hour, overturned on a family vehicle, causing serious head injury to a young child.
Now police officers, even very good police officers, oftentimes are not trained to recognize some of these issues
about the handling characteristics of trucks
and may miss things. In handling these cases, we, where appropriate, get experts to assist us in evaluating these cases
and explain these issues to the court and jury.