With an average of one semi truck accident a day on Houston's freeways - that often results in bodily injury if not a loss of life - the issue of semi truck safety is always relevant and will be the topic for this entry. 
One organization Road Safe America is devoted to creating safer roads across the United States. Their focus is on improving the training for commercial truck drivers - a move they believe will improve safety for everyone who ventures onto the highway.
RoadsofAmerica.org purports that the responsibility of a semi truck driver is comparable to that of commercial airline pilots and thus requires an in-kind level of training.
One cannot argue the vital role commercial truck drivers provide to our economy but a comparison of the rules and requirements of each field are no less than shocking.
For instance, while there are only half a million commercial airline pilots in this country there are over ten million commercial truck drivers.
An airline pilot is federally restricted to fly no more than thirty hours a week while a semi truck driver can be on the road seventy seven hours a week - or eleven hours a day. Anybody that has taken a long road trip knows that tedium and fatigue begin to work against safe driving after several hours behind the wheel.
A figure of eleven hours is outside the boundaries of an average workday and frankly, in my opinion does not make sense.
Finally, in the last three years only one hundred deaths have occurred on commercial flights while over 15,000 have been the result of semi truck drivers – and between three and four hundred thousand have been injured.
Drive defensively out there.
Greg Baumgartner is a Texas truck accident lawyer, who handles truck accidents in Texas, serious injury car accidents, wrongful death cases and other personal injury lawsuits.
