Comments

swampscotter, you are correct in your recant of the DOT regulations regarding service hours... however, I question your interpretation of the statistics. Of course, there are more fatalities with cars because there are almost 30 times as many registered cars than large trucks. If you go to http://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/CarrierResearchResults/HTML/2006Crashfacts/2006LargeTruckCrashFacts.htm and compare the Large Truck Fatal Crash Statistics against the Passenger Vehicle Fatal Crash Statistics, you will see that truck drivers on average are NOT as safe as Passenger Vehicles. In 2006, for every 100M miles traveled, truckers had 2.24 fatalities compared to 1.37 fatalities for cars. That tells me that truckers have 60% more fatalities than drivers of cars. Now the question becomes... "Why are truckers having all of these accidents?" For this we need to go to another DOT study: http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/facts-research/research-technology/analysis/FMCSA-RRA-07-017.htm Here we find that 87% of trucker accidents are due to driver issues... falling asleep, inattentive, distracted as well as heart attacks, driving too fast, driving too closely, driver panicked, etc. Hence, the reason for the blue light to keep the driver alert. Does this mean we need to keep the truckers off the street to make our roads safe? Absolutely NOT. This country lives and dies by the truckers. Most everything we use, eat, buy or sleep on is dependent on a trucker to get it there. My point is, we have an issue with fatalities, trucks and cars alike and if this device can reduce the fatalities for the drivers who are most prone to them, then we should not be against it.