Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Large Truck Crash Facts 2003, February 2005

Introduction

This annual edition of the Large Truck Crash Facts contains descriptive statistics about fatal, injury and property-damage-only crashes involving large trucks in 2003. This report also contains selected crash statistics on passenger vehicles for comparison purposes.

Data Sources

The information in this report was compiled by the Analysis Division of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). The major sources for the data are described below:

Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). FARS, maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), is a census of fatal crashes involving motor vehicles traveling on public trafficways. FARS is recognized as the most reliable national crash database, but it contains information only on fatal crashes. A large truck is defined in FARS as a truck with a gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) of more than 10,000 pounds.

General Estimates System (GES). GES, also maintained by NHTSA, is a probability-based, nationally representative sample of all police-reported fatal, injury, and property damage only crashes. The data from GES yields national estimates, calculated using a weighting procedure, but cannot give state-level estimates. Also, GES is a sample of motor vehicle crashes and results generated are estimates. For this reason all GES data shown in this report are rounded to the nearest thousand. The GES definition of a large truck is the same as the FARS definition.

Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS) Crash File. The MCMIS Crash File, maintained by FMCSA, contains data on trucks and buses in crashes that meet the National Governors' Association (NGA) recommended threshold. An NGA reportable crash must involve a truck (a vehicle that is designed, used, or maintained primarily for carrying property and has at least two axles and six tires) or a bus (a vehicle with seats for at least 9 people, including the driver). The crash must result in at least one fatality, at least one injury for which the injured person was taken to a medical facility for immediate medical attention, or at least one vehicle that was towed from the scene as a result of disabling crash damage. The crashes are reported by the States to FMCSA through the SAFETYNET computer software.
The MCMIS Crash File is intended to be a census of trucks and buses involved in fatal, injury and towaway crashes; some States do not report all NGA-eligible crashes. For 2003, States reported 120,826 trucks involved in nonfatal crashes, and 4,367 through SAFETYNET to the MCMIS Crash File. Based on the 2003 GES data, an estimated 136,000 trucks were involved in nonfatal crashes that should have been reported. Thus, FMCSA received reports on about 89 percent of the trucks involved in NGA-reportable nonfatal crashes and 94 percent of the trucks involved in fatal crashes.

FARS, GES, and MCMIS describe the events and details of motor vehicle crashes, but they do not include data on crash causation or fault.

Highway Statistics

Highway Statistics is an annual publication of the Office of Highway Policy Information of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). State agencies report the data, ranging from driver licensing to highway finance, and FHWA aggregates them to get national totals. This report takes vehicle miles traveled and vehicle registrations from Table VM-1, “Annual Vehicle Distance Traveled in Miles and Related Data” of Highway Statistics.

Organization of the Report

This year’s report is organized into four chapters: Trends, Crashes, Vehicles, and People. The Trends chapter shows data from 2003 in the context of available historical data for past years. In the other chapters, the 2003 data are shown in different ways, according to what is being counted. The Crashes chapter counters numbers of crashes; the Vehicle chapter counts vehicles in crashes; and the People chapter counts persons of all types involved in crashes. Four different types of counts are shown:

Crashes: Numbers of crashes involving various vehicle types.

Vehicles in Crashes: Numbers of vehicles involved in crashes. These counts may be larger than the number of crashes (fatal, injury, or property damage only), because more than one vehicle may be involved in a single crash.

People in Crashes: Numbers of people killed or injured in crashes. These counts generally are larger than the number of crashes (fatal or injury), because more than one person may be killed or injured in a single crash. People killed or injured may be occupants on the truck, occupants of another motor vehicle, or nonmotorists (pedestrians or pedalcyclists).

Drivers in Crashes: Numbers of vehicle drivers involved in crashes. These counts are generally equal to the numbers of vehicles involved in crashes.