Truck researcher disproves a productivity report that attempts to ‘smear our industry’

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ARLINGTON, Va. –Today,  a leading transportation researcher exposed the truth of a misleading  truck productivity report.

“It has been demonstrated to a reasonable certainty the crash analysis suffered from numerous fatal errors. Trucks are misclassified,” said Daniel Blower, an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and expert on truck safety and truck crash data. “Fatalities are miscounted. The errors are substantial and not recoverable.”

Blower’s critique was done at the request of the American Trucking Associations and debunks the report issues by the Multimodal Transportation & Infrastructure Consortium on behalf of the Railway Supply Institute.

Blower said, “all of the numbers in the tables are seriously wrong. In the process of trying to understand how the authors could have gotten the numbers so wrong, I found fundamental errors of analysis and evaluation.”

Among the errors found were the misclassification of truck type, analytical techniques that result in double-counting, use of incorrect crash statistics and unexplained estimates.

“In the end, I found errors and misconceptions serious enough to undermine any validity to the crash rate analysis,” Blower said.

“Dr. Blower’s analysis demonstrates what we have been saying for a long time,” ATA president and CEO Bill Graves said. “Trucking’s critics have no qualms about stretching, sometimes well past the breaking point, data and arguments to smear our industry.

“When the real world experience of more productive trucks, like twin 33-foot trailers, shows they improve efficiency – while not creating the cataclysmic safety problems these groups claim they will – they’re forced to go even further, and in the case of this most recent report, so far as to stretch the facts beyond recognition and well past the point of being useful in constructive discussions about safety.”

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