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Senator slams the FMCSA for failing to provide safety oversight to America’s commercial trucking industry

A U.S. Senator for Massachusetts has slammed “egregious failures” by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) for its lack of oversight, which he says is linked to an increase in fatal, truck-involved crashes.

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A Pilot’s Comparison of Safety in Planes Versus Cars

I’ve just had a great conversation, this evening, with a pilot who was at the next table to mine at dinner.

Our initial topic came from him and was about the safety comparison between air travel and driving, so I asked whether he was aware that for every person killed in commercial flights worldwide, each year, over 2,160 people are killed in road crashes.  Yes, a ratio of more than 2,000-to-1,  and even the number of people killed annually just on America’s roads is over 60-times greater than the total number of plane-crash fatalities worldwide.

Various Boeing jets in BBJ livery. (Wikimedia Commons.)

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Teen driver gets 3 years in 118 mph prom weekend crash that killed his friend

Memorial Page

Alexis “Lexi” Faye (17) NJ

 

Alexis Faye (Courtesy of Briana Moffat)

Around 5:30pm on Saturday, May 11, 2019, a teen driver crashed a Mercedes sedan at 118 mph in a 40 mph limit at Greendale Road, Fredon, NJ, resulting in the death of his friend Alexis “Lexi” Faye.

The driver has now been sentenced to three years in a state youth detention facility after pleading guilty to death by auto and violating a public safety law resulting in serious bodily injury.

RS-USA Comment:  Beyond the unspeakable tragedy of this incident, it is high-time the media — such as Fox News this time — became responsible enough to report such events as crashes, not accidents.  The driver on this occasion most certainly cannot claim that his alleged speed of 118 mph in a 40 mph limit is somehow “accidental,” or that the fact he then lost control of the vehicle, which ran off the road and rolled over, is somehow “accidental.”

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The Big List — U.S. Road Crash Fatality Comparisons that will Stun You!

For many years, there has been a tendency to state that ‘x’ days of road fatalities are the same as a full Jumbo Jet airliner crashing, but no matter how effective the comparison is intended to be, this relies on both the teller and the listener knowing – for example – which size of Jumbo jet one is talking about; there are several different passenger-carrying capacities so even though it is a big plane the concept is a bit vague.

Memorial garden at the crash site of Colgan Air (Continental Connection) Flight 3407, which occured on February 12, 2009, with the loss of fifty lives.
The memorial garden in Clarence Center, NY, a location which — at the time of writing — is the site of the most recent passenger plane crash in the USA, which occurred more than ten years ago.  As a matter of perspective, however, the fifty people lost in that tragic, headline-news incident represent less than half of the people who are killed, on average, every single day of every year on America’s roads. (Copyright image, 2019.)

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