Share the Road works with safety partners at Lifesavers Conference
Bill Graves
The Trucker News Services
4/7/2008
ARLINGTON, Va. — The American Trucking Associations’ Share the Road program is heading to Portland, Ore. for the 2008 Lifesavers Conference April 13-15.
Lifesavers is the premier national highway safety meeting in the United States dedicated to reducing the tragic toll of deaths and injuries on our nation's roadways. The Lifesavers Conference has become even more relevant and timely, providing a great forum for Share the Road professional drivers to deliver the trucking industry’s message of safety on our nation’s highways.
Highway safety partners attending the Lifesavers Conference include child passenger safety professionals, state and local law enforcement, community traffic safety programs, state and local emergency medical services, and public health, injury prevention programs, federal and state highway safety agencies, prosecutors and judges involved in traffic safety issues, the automotive and insurance industries and advocacy and research organizations.
The American Trucking Associations has led the campaign for tough safety laws that affect every truck driver on the nation’s highways.
ATA’s overall safety agenda includes greater education on sharing the road with large trucks, adoption of a national maximum speed limit of 65 mph for all vehicles, the adoption of primary safety belt laws in all states and increased traffic enforcement for all vehicles that operate unsafely around large trucks. ATA also supports limiting truck speeds to 68 mph at the time of manufacture through the use of an engine governor.
As a means of further improving highway safety, ATA was instrumental in getting the Commercial Drivers License (CDL) program established. The goal of the program is to ensure that drivers of large trucks and buses are qualified to operate these vehicles and, to remove unsafe and unqualified drivers from the highways. State licensing agencies administer the program which requires them to adopt national minimum testing standards to license a CDL driver.
Driving records for all CDL holders are retained in a centralized computer registry to prevent drivers from obtaining multiple licenses, hiding violations and driving status. ATA was also involved in establishing mandatory drug and alcohol testing requirements, increase in roadside safety checks and banning radar detectors from all commercial trucks operating in interstate commerce. ATA has proposed improvements to truck driver safety records in order to allow employers to weed out unsafe drivers prior to hiring.
Share the Road is a highway safety outreach program of the American Trucking Associations that educates all drivers about sharing the roads safely with large trucks. An elite team of professional truck drivers with millions of accident-free miles deliver life-saving messages to millions of motorists annually. The safety program is sponsored by Mack Trucks, Inc. and Michelin North America, Inc.