Speed Limiters on Trucks: Enhancing Safety and Compliance

The stopping difference between large trucks and significantly smaller automobiles grows as their speed increases. Pure physics governs this. The speed limiter regulation will lower the top speed at which huge trucks are permitted to drive on our highways, lowering the greatest potential distance needed to brake suddenly as well as the maximum potential force needed to crash. Simply said, this regulation will stop hundreds of people from dying and being hurt in truck accidents because of speed. The driving public needs, wants, and deserves this law because it makes sense.

Facts:

The only advanced nation lacking such a regulation is the United States. The most populous Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec), Japan, Australia, and the European Union all demand that large commercial trucks have speed governors installed at speeds ranging from 65 mph in Canada to 55 mph in Japan.

Since the 1990s, most heavy rigs have been equipped with speed-limiting systems, as stated by the agencies in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM).

They may be installed on vehicles using this technique without incurring any capital costs.

According to the NPRM, restricting the speed of large vehicles to:

• 60 mph would prevent 162 to 498 fatalities each year,
• 65 mph would prevent 63 to 214 fatalities each year,
• 68 mph would prevent 27 to 96 fatalities each year.

According to a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) research, vehicles without speed governors were engaged in high-speed crashes at a rate that was twice as high as trucks with speed governors.

According to studies made public by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, once obligatory speed limiter technology was implemented in Ontario, deaths in all collisions involving large rigs decreased by 24% and speed-related, at-fault truck crashes decreased by 73%.