Bicyclist Hit by Dump Truck and Pinned Underneath in Otay Mesa Collision
For pedestrians, bikes, small cars, scooters, mopeds, electric bikes, even small car drivers: being near a large truck in traffic on city streets is an everyday dangerous type of situation.
If large trucks and dump trucks were required to have rear and side guards, all vulnerable road users would be safer.
In the USA bicycle safety advocates call for these side guards to be made a requirement on all commercial trucks. The safety improvement would affect safety for cars, pedestrians, motorcycles and bicyclists.
“Truck lateral protective devices are vehicle-based safety devices designed to keep pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists from being run over by a large truck’s rear wheels in a side-impact collision. While large trucks comprise 4 percent of registered vehicles, large trucks are involved in 10 percent of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities. In 2018, these nonmotorist fatalities rose to 541, the highest since 1990.” Truck Lateral Protective Device
The lives that could be saved by mandating side and rear guards for big trucks and semi trailers would be huge. The most recent NHTSA analysis looked only at crashes that occurred at speeds under 40 mph, and most of the experts in the USA gave push back, “NTSB, IIHS say feds significantly underestimate lives that can be saved.”
That benefit shortfall alarms the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which contends NHTSA’s analysis focused only on crashes in which the front of a passenger vehicle slides under the side of a trailer. NHTSA did not fully consider other crash types that would likely benefit from side guards installed on a truck that could prevent such an “underride,” according to NTSB, such as high-speed sideswipe crashes, impacts with vulnerable road users such as motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians, or side underride collisions with single-unit trucks.
“Further, NHTSA only calculated potential safety benefits for about 20% of fatal crashes in which NHTSA estimated that the passenger vehicle was traveling under 40 mph,” wrote NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy in comments filed in response to the proposal. “For crashes where the estimated speed was over 40 mph, NHTSA’s analysis assumed that a side underride guard would have no effectiveness.”