America's Dangerous Trucks (full documentary) FRONTLINE
Deadly traffic accidents involving large trucks have surged over the past decade. FRONTLINE and ProPublica investigate one particularly gruesome kind of truck accident — underride crashes — and why they keep happening.
“These are crashes where a smaller vehicle gets caught under large trucks like 18-wheelers, often with devastating consequences,” says award-winning correspondent A.C. Thompson (“Documenting Hate,” “American Insurrection,” and “Law & Disorder”). “Our new investigation explores what the trucking industry and the government knew about these crashes, when they knew it, and their role in the fight over safety measures that could potentially save thousands of lives.”
America’s Dangerous Trucks is a FRONTLINE production with Midnight Films LLC in partnership with ProPublica. The director is Gabrielle Schonder. The producers are A.C. Thompson, Gabrielle Schonder and Karim Hajj. The correspondent is A.C. Thompson. The writers are A.C. Thompson and Gabrielle Schonder. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
( The culprit here is deregulation going back to the Reagan era. There are good people who tried under the Obama administration, take a listen and please share with your elected reps. )
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The caliber of drivers these days as I'm retired and try to stay off the interstate highways. I do object to the length of trailers but also the amount of stuff attached to them to keep cars from going under them.
I only had one accident in my whole career and it was someone in a car trying to pass me from the right and trying to take my lane before clearing the front end of my truck. I was already standing on the brakes, the wheels locked up, before they even made contact. I could see the driver when they chose to make their move, it was stupid, they could have just slowed down as someone was entering from a makeshift ramp in a construction zone. When it was over that car was wedged between the front end of the truck and the cement barrier on the left, front end folded in half, nobody was hurt. During the whole five seconds of the event I was wondering if I could live with knowing those people in the car might be dead at the end of it all.
Any number of circumstance apply but the main thing is that most class C drivers insist they possess and employ the skills of a class A driver who is trained and paid to drive large vehicles. It's not as easy as some think to acquire and maintain the license. It is a privilege not a right to hold a driver's license, any class, in any state yet everyone thinks it is their right to drive and in any manner they chose. I fault advertising and teevee for that. And most drivers lose skills as they tend to think a newer car with newer safety features means they don't have to pay attention as much or something but they sure are too distracted to pay attention and not crash into stuff.
Anyway, Denver and the Rocky mountain front is one of my least favorite places to drive any kind of vehicle because of the style of bad driving exhibited there, SLC and LA have their own styles, it's weird.
I would like to see efficient vehicles that run on something other than fossil fuels but are the size of my mid-sized SUV. Need 4WD with clearance out here, in some places the only pavement is on the streets in town and the hwy to get someplace else.
