A year after a Walmart trucker who had not slept in over 24 hours crashed into comedian Tracy Morgan’s vehicle on a New Jersey highway, killing Morgan’s friend and hospitalizing other passengers, the company has settled Morgan’s lawsuit out of court. As that case comes to a close, Congress is weighing legislation that could make highways more dangerous for truckers and everyone who shares the road with them.
The June 2014 collision happened when driver Kevin Roper slammed into Morgan’s vehicle at excess speed, killing a fellow comedian named James McNair and causing grievous injuries to the other occupants. National Transportation Safety Board investigators estimate Roper was driving about 20 miles per hour faster than the speed limit when he hit Morgan and McNair, who were stopped in traffic just a few miles from Roper’s destination in Perth Amboy.
Roper faces trial for five separate criminal charges related to the crash and to McNair’s death, but Walmart’s role in the story came to a close Wednesday when Morgan’s attorneys announced an unspecified settlement. The case had seemed likely to go to court in the months after Morgan sued. The company’s lawyers told a judge last fall that Morgan’s traumatic brain injury and McNair’s death had been “caused, in whole or in part, by plaintiffs’ failure to properly wear an appropriate available seat belt.” On Wednesday Morgan said the company “did right by me and my family,” but the settlement terms will remain sealed.
The federal agency that oversees the trucking industry thinks it knows how to reduce the likelihood that truckers like Roper will ever find themselves behind the wheel without having slept in over a day. In 2013, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) issued revised rules governing tractor-trailer drivers’ sleep schedules.
The biggest change involved the rule that tries to simulate a weekend for a group of workers who don’t follow any traditional office-style schedule. When truckers crack a certain threshold of hours on duty in any seven-day span, they must take a 34-hour “restart period” of concerted rest before getting back on the road. The 2013 changes meant that every restart period must include two consecutive nights of sleep, which hadn’t necessarily been required under the original rules. Figuring out how to write one regulation that can apply the two-nights-sleep principle to tens of thousands of different schedules around the country is intensely complicated, and the FMCSA spent years studying what works and what doesn’t before unveiling the rules.
The largest trucking trade association has adamantly opposed those changes and decried the science underlying them, though the sleep researchers who conducted the study told ThinkProgress last summer that the American Trucking Association’s arguments were incorrect. The omnibus spending bill President Obama signed in December included a provision suspending the revised sleep rules until this coming September. Now, a transportation funding bill that would make it much harder for FMCSA to reinstate the rules is on its way through the House.
In addition to further delaying the two-nights-sleep rules, the House measure would open the roads to tractor-trailer assemblies that could be almost 20 percent longer than is currently allowed. When haulers want to hitch two trailers to one tractor, today’s rules say each of the twinned trailers must be 28 feet long or shorter. The House bill would extend that limit to 33 feet, raising the full length of a dual-haul tractor-trailer by 10 feet. That’s another 10 feet of surface area to catch crosswinds that push these enormous configurations around on the highway, and another 10 feet of truck for a driver to worry about managing. One highway safety advocate called the bill “a death warrant for American families,” according to Bloomberg.
But while longer trucks and looser sleep rules may frighten travelers, neither is the biggest driver of trucking mishaps. Truckers are paid poorly in general, often getting paid per mile rather than by the hour. Many rely on getting to a destination by a certain cutoff time in order to earn enough to make ends meet. And while the trucking industry notes that many companies have started to adopt different payment models to reduce the incentive for drivers to push their limits, the reality remains that a road is only as safe as the most reckless person on it. Whether its pay-per-mile, sleep rules, or the physical arrangement of a truck, the FMCSA’s job is to create a system that addresses those lowest common denominators — but the regulator won’t be free to do so if the current House transportation funding bill becomes law.