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This would be quicker than spending the night (and the money) at a sleep center for a screening.

American Thoracic Society Journal news tips for August 2004 (second issue)

Screening for Obstructive Sleep Apnea in Commerical Drivers

In an effort to develop a simpler test to identify commercial truck drivers who suffer from severe sleep apnea and who might fall asleep at the wheel, medical investigators have developed a two-stage strategy combining questions about the symptoms of sleep apnea, with body weight data, plus a test for oxygen concentration in the blood when needed. From this combination, they produced a predictive rate of 91 percent for the disorder. To develop their new test, researchers studied 406 commercial drivers in order to uncover cases of sleep apnea before a crash.

What’s with that “before a crash” line? It’s scary enough already to think there are 28% of truck drivers with sleep apnea.
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Eyewitness News 11.com: Truck Driver Shortage Increases Prices — And Job Opportunities

Faced with a shortage of drivers, some trucking companies are charging more to move merchandise– costs passed onto you and me. The shortage is delivering a blow to the consumers, but a boon to people who are willing to make the long hauls.

The driver shortage is causing companies to offer better pay and benefits. Drivers can start at $35,000… eventually make $70,000 to $100,000 a year with overtime.

Anyone except for unions get overtime? I’m pretty sure that pay scale is union too. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t reflect the rest of the industry.
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Groups say U.S.-Mexican safety discrepancies should delay border

WASHINGTON — There are “significant differences” between Mexican and U.S. highway safety laws that need to be addressed before the border opens, according to a Public Citizen press release issued Aug. 13.

Six areas mentioned in the release include: Commercial Driver’s License requirements; alcohol and drug testing systems; hazmat transport; Mexico’s alleged lack of a motor carrier “information database”; compliance with U.S. safety standards; and insurance verification.

“The Group of the Insane” might be good for something.
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Claybrook: highway fatality statistics get ’spin’

Claybrook, in a release issued Aug. 10, stated that the “historic low” in highway deaths, an .8 percent reduction from 2002, was only part of a steady historic decline — 46 percent between 1982 and 2002, and not really news.

The number of highway deaths for 2003 was the lowest since record keeping began 29 years ago; although the number of fatalities involving large trucks grew slightly, from 4,939 to 4,986, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

NHTSA’s “latest spin also downplays the real news in the numbers — that 42,643 people lost their lives on the road last year,” Claybrook said.

Claybrook maintained that the Department of Transportation had done an “about face.” She said that NHTSA Administrator Dr. Jeffrey Runge in 2003 said a declining death rate was not cause for celebration and predicted highway fatalities could reach 50,000 annually by the year 2008.

Now, however, “the emphasis has shifted to death rates rather than real numbers,” Claybrook said.

It must be me. Someone explain what this woman is saying. Aren’t death rates real numbers? Deaths went down, but she’s not happy until it’s zero? Sorry, don’t think that’s going to happen.

At least she didn’t bring up trucks. Whose numbers are about the same under 5,000. And the ATA had to put their two cents in saying that

…most truck crashes involve at least one passenger vehicle and that errors by passenger car drivers cause up to 75 percent of car-truck crashes.

These people are completely insane.

ATA Endorses Kellers’ SAFE-Sim™ Truck Driving Simulator

American Trucking Associations announces its endorsement of J. J. Keller and Associates, Inc.’s SAFE-Sim™ Truck Driving Simulator, a revolutionary, PC-based driver-training simulator.

SAFE-Sim™ combines driver training and technology in a virtual training environment and provides affordable, customizable hands-on training designed to help reduce vehicle crashes in the real world.

Like flight simulators for pilots, SAFE-Sim puts drivers behind the wheel, allowing them to “drive” a tractor-trailer or straight truck through a virtual world of city streets, two-lane highways, interstates/freeways and mountain roads.

Wonder what took so long. Where’s the shifter? Here’s the actual site. They should have gotten the video game that I’ve seen in a few truck stops. This is probably cheaper but this screams BORING! Try not to fall asleep at the wheel.

This lawyer thinks he has a good handle on what the court is looking for when the FMCSA comes back on the deadline on Aug 30. And it’s not a pretty picture for companies or drivers.

Opinion: There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise

If trucking companies, owner-operators and shippers did not like the hours-of-service regulations that went into effect Jan. 4, they could hate what the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration comes up with following the decision in Public Citizen v. FMCSA.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the new HOS regulations because, it said, FMCSA failed to consider the effect of these regulations on the health of the driver, as required by statute.

There are many who think this is an easy problem to fix. Simply have FMCSA issue additional findings that say it has considered the health effects of the regulations and they have no adverse effect on driver health.

However, this approach ignores the bulk of the court’s opinion, in which the judges pointed out all the other problems they saw with the new rules and why they considered them to be arbitrary and capricious. Any one of these other problems would have been sufficient to declare the regulations void.

Even though the official ruling was about driver’s health, there’s more to the picture.
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