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Transportation Safety Rules Eliminated under Trump
Trump's Transportation Department is halting rules developed to address dangerous transportation safety problems from speeding tractor-trailers to sleepy railroad engineers. This is motivated by a criminal quest to roll back regulations across the government. Regulations protect us.
An Associated Press review of the department's rulemaking activities in Trump's first year in office shows at least a dozen safety rules that were under development or already adopted have been repealed, withdrawn, delayed or put on the back burner. In most cases, those rules are opposed by powerful industries. And the political appointees running the agencies that write the rules often come from the industries they regulate.
Meanwhile, there have been no significant new safety rules adopted over the same period.
In one case, a massive tractor-trailer crash in Tennessee which killed six and seriously injured four more, caused new rules to be adopted which Trump's team has stopped.
In response to this and similar crashes, the government in 2016 proposed requiring that new heavy trucks have potentially life-saving software that would electronically limit speeds. But now, like many other safety rules in the works before Trump took office, it has been delayed indefinitely by the Transportation Department...
...the rule would have economic benefits, according to a DOT estimate.... It would save as many as 498 lives per year and produce a net cost savings to society of $475 million to nearly $5 billion annually..... That's nearly half the 1,100 deaths annually in crashes involving heavy trucks on roads with speed limits of 55 mph or higher.
You can't say it better than this by John Risch. "These rules have been written in blood," said Risch, national legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers. "But we're in a new era now of little-to-no new regulations no matter how beneficial they might be. The focus is what can we repeal and rescind."
The sidelined rules would have, among other things, required states to conduct annual inspections of commercial bus operators, railroads to operate trains with at least two crew members and automakers to equip future cars and light trucks with vehicle-to-vehicle communications to prevent collisions. Many of the rules were prompted by tragic events.
For example:
Some rules that were in the works have been abandoned entirely. After four people died when a New York commuter train derailed while speeding around a curve in 2013, investigators determined that the engineer had....undiagnosed sleep apnea.... and had made no effort to stop the train.
The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the crash in part on federal regulators for not requiring medical screening of engineers for sleep disorders. Yet last summer, DOT withdrew a rule the government was in the early stages of writing to require screening for engineers and truck and bus drivers.
The NTSB has cited sleep apnea as a cause of 13 rail and highway accidents it has investigated....
What's going on here? The same as always. Powerful industry groups pay off elected and appointed government officials to get what they want. THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING FOR US.
The American Trucking Associations, an industry trade group, has claimed credit for stalling the rule. A news release from the associations said its success in stalling the rule is a significant triumph for the industry.
The trucking industry has developed a strong relationship with Trump. Trucking officials met with Transportation Department Secretary Elaine Chao within hours after she took office, according to Chris Spear, the trade group's president. Trump welcomed trucking executives to the White House by climbing behind the wheel of a Mack truck parked on the South Lawn in March.
Blood on the hands of Trump and his appointees.