Agency offering $7 million to advance crash data collection

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is awarding up to $7 million in funding to state and local enforcement agencies to help understand the factors contributing to large-truck crashes.

The money is being awarded as part of the agency’s Crash Casual Factors Program (CCFP), a multi-year effort to find and share key contributing factors in commercial vehicle crashes. The program’s current emphasis is a study focusing on fatal crashes involving heavy-duty (Class 7/8) trucks, collecting and analyzing data on driver, vehicle, motor carrier, and environmental factors.

With individual awards of up to $500,000, the new funding opportunity “will support activities that maximize effective data collection,” the FMCSA says. This includes:

• Post-crash inspections,
• Crash reconstructions,
• Post-crash investigations,
• Crash data reporting, and
• Equipment needed for data collection.

The latest study involves a target sampling across 30 states over 2 years. Data will be collected from about 2,000 fatal crashes involving heavy-duty trucks.

After collecting and analyzing the data, the FMCSA and DOT aim to provide information and resources to be used to develop useful strategies to reduce the number of fatal crashes among these vehicles. The FMCSA has pegged 2030 as the year by which it will release a database of anonymized crash data for public use and issue a Heavy-Duty Truck Study final report.

Research shows that of the trucks involved in fatal crashes, roughly 70% of them were heavy-duty trucks with a GVWR of 26,001 pounds or more, including vehicles like truck-tractor semi-trailers, garbage trucks, and cement trucks, making this statistic a top priority for the FMCSA.

The CCFP is also addressing the need for updated information on crash casual factors, expanding on the Large Truck Crash Causation Study (LTCCS) which is 20 years old.