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Are the Recession and the Decline in Commercial Motor Vehicle Crashes Related? Is Commercial Vehicle Enforcement More Effective During a Recession?

As you know, ITRE has been supporting the analysis and program evaluation needs of the North Carolina Motor Carrier Enforcement Administration (MCE) for years. A primary function of MCE as well as the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is to reduce truck-involved crashes.

During the recent economic downturn/recession, there has been a significant reduction in truck-involved crashes and fatalities. There has been a similar reduction in crashes for passenger vehicles. Can it be that commercial motor vehicle enforcement is more effective during a recession and should therefore be given primary credit for the improvement in safety?

Not likely. These Power Point slides (PDF:408KB) present data - both CMV crash data as well as selected indicators of economic system performance - that suggest a 'correlation' between the frequency of truck involved crashes and key indicators of industrial production, imports, exports, and consumption. These factors can be considered as primary factors governing freight demand; and in turn, generators of freight to be moved by commercial motor vehicles.

We know that measures of freight demand, actual tonnage moved, etc. have decreased during the current recession. We know that many carriers have, in fact, gone out of business, and that truck manufacturers have seen a decrease in sales.  One would expect that measures of truck exposure data (truck vehicle miles traveled, or VMT) would also show a decline although available data suggest that truck VMT has remained relatively flat during this period. Doubtful!

We know that there was a decline in diesel fuel consumption during the recession and that diesel fuel consumption is widely recognized as being correlated with economic growth. Diesel consumption figures suggest that truck exposure (i.e., miles traveled) was in fact reduced and that being the case one would also suspect that truck-involved crashes would be reduced as well.

It is interesting to speculate on how truck crashes might be reduced, not through an economic recession, but as a result of factors that might impact the dynamic operating environment of trucking in the same way (i.e., reduced VMT, etc.)--without an economic downturn/recession. The second slide speculates that such factors might include:

• a reduced road footprint of freight through the use of more productive (longer, heavier) commercial vehicle configurations,
• a reduction in truck density resulting from a partial transfer of freight from truck to rail,
• a change in land use patterns with respect to the proximity of the consumer and the point at which the product consumed in produced,
• the elimination over time of smaller, less productive, and higher (crash) risk carriers,
• the removal of the 'bad' drivers from the population of available drivers,
• incentives for safer, more productive carriers to implement more productive and safer vehicles, and
• a reduction in overall traffic density through the shift of personal travel from private vehicle to public/mass transit options, etc.

It is clear that as we move out of the current recession, freight demand will increase as our population continues to grow and to demand products which at some point in their travel to the market place must be transported by truck. When commercial vehicle crashes begin to rise again, what will the response of commercial vehicle enforcement community be? The interesting problem suggested by the data in the first slide is 'when these economic indicators point to a recovery what will the prediction be in terms of the expected level of commercial vehicle crashes?'  If enforcement has in fact been effective in driving down crashes, and truck VMT remains relatively flat, how will we explain the rise in crashes?

Shouldn't our commercial vehicle safety focus be on how to generate the crash reduction benefits experienced during the recession ... without a recession and associated loss of productivity?