Large Trucks
Motley Rice seeks accountability and compensation for individuals and families in personal injury and wrongful death cases involving trucking incidents. If you or someone you know is interested in seeking legal recourse as a result of a commercial truck incident, contact attorney Mary Schiavo by email or call +1 800.768.4026.
Sharing the Road
Large trucks are interstate commercial transport vehicles, also known as tractor trailers, that weigh more than 10,000 pounds. In the past decade, large trucks have covered a total of more than 200,000 million miles each year. As large trucks share the roadways with millions of passenger vehicles, maintaining safe operations is of the utmost importance, including providing operator and driver education, regulating mandatory driver rest periods and qualifications, traveling at safe speeds and adhering to traffic laws.
When large truck operators and drivers fail to adhere to mandatory safety guidelines, catastrophic incidents can occur, resulting in fatalities and injuries. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), one of nine traffic fatalities in 2007 occurred in a collision involving a large truck. Passengers of other vehicles are most at risk in a crash with a large truck, which account for 75% of the fatalities of large truck collisions tin 2007.
Tractor trailer operations are regulated by the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), and may fall under other federal agencies depending on the contents of their cargo.
Investigating a Large Truck Crash
Crashes involving tractor trailers are often complex, involving two or more vehicles, and crash reconstruction experts are rarely able to name just one cause of the incident.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigates major large truck crashes and publishes a final report on the causes of the crash. Factors analyzed in the investigation include driver training, weather conditions, highway conditions and traffic signals, as well as the design, manufacture and maintenance of the vehicle and its component parts.
Motley Rice is positioned to handle the legal, technical and financial aspects of cases involving large truck incidents. Our attorneys have litigated numerous complex transportation lawsuits and worked with experts and incident recreation specialists to build the strongest cases possible for our clients.
Common Factors in Large Truck Crashes
The Large Truck Causation Study conducted by FMCSA and NHTSA concluded that driver behavior causes most large truck crashes. The most common causes cited were:
- driver decisions, including speeding, illegal maneuvers and misjudgment
- driver inattention and distractions
- physical driver factors such as sleeping at the wheel
Additionally, NHTSA traffic safety data indicates that one-quarter of large truck drivers involved in a fatal crash had at least one prior speeding conviction.