Road safety, trucking and the law, explained.
Each national crash number comes from a system built to answer one question. A guide to the census, the sample, the carrier files, the one-time causation studies and the compilations that repackage them.
Editorial Desk7 min read
Investigators coded fatigue for 13 percent of truck drivers in the largest federal study of serious truck crashes. Police coded it for 1.4 percent in the 2019 and 2020 fatal-crash census. The gap is the story.
Editorial Desk8 min read
Virginia's crash database records thousands of deer collisions a year, and the state's own researchers say it misses most of them. A guide to the numbers, the season and the aftermath.
Editorial Desk8 min read
Hitting a deer and swerving into a guardrail can damage a car the same way and still be paid under different parts of the policy. A short guide to how animal-strike claims usually work.
Editorial Desk3 min read
A lapse that would dent a fender in a car-on-car crash can kill a rider. Here is why the risk falls so unevenly, and why the official numbers cannot fully measure it.
Editorial Desk6 min read
Evidence from a truck crash does not vanish all at once. It goes in a rough order, starting with marks on the pavement and ending with records federal rules require carriers to keep for months or years.
Editorial Desk6 min read
A general freight carrier's federal insurance floor is $750,000 per accident, the same figure that took effect on January 1, 1985. What the floor covers, what guarantees it, and why raising it has stalled.
Editorial Desk6 min read
Federal hours-of-service rules run several clocks at once. This explainer takes them one at a time, then follows a hypothetical driver through a full day to show where each one stops the truck.
Editorial Desk8 min read
Brakes, tires and cargo securement lead the list of defects that take trucks off the road at roadside. Federal rules require carriers to find them first and to keep the paperwork that proves it.
Editorial Desk7 min read
A reconstruction turns marks, damage and stored data into speeds, positions and timing. Every method rests on assumptions, and the best work says plainly what each number depends on.
Editorial Desk5 min read
The most detailed federal look at why large trucks crash is now more than twenty years old. Read carefully, it still says a great deal, and much of it is not what the usual summaries claim.
Editorial Desk7 min read
People walking and cycling have no crash structure, so the margin for error has to come from the road. How speed, width and light shape their odds, and what engineers can change.
Editorial Desk6 min read
Texas police reported 38,533 crashes involving a commercial motor vehicle in 2025, and 528 people died in them. Here are the yearly and county counts, where they come from, and what each one measures.
Editorial Desk7 min read
The federal truck and bus safety rules, part by part: who they reach, where the text lives, and which documents sit beside them without being them.
Editorial Desk7 min read
A crash involving a commercial truck can draw in far more parties than the two drivers. Each faces its own theory of responsibility, shaped by federal safety rules and by the law of the state where the case is heard.
Editorial Desk8 min read
An ELD is an hours-of-service record, not a black box. Knowing the difference saves investigators from asking it questions it was never built to answer.
Editorial Desk4 min read
The engine computer in a tractor-trailer was built to run the engine and serve fleet managers, not to investigate crashes. It often holds crash data anyway, if the data survives the hours after the collision.
Editorial Desk6 min read
The figure everyone quotes is 94 percent. It comes from a federal survey of crashes from 2005 to 2007, and it measures something narrower than most people who repeat it assume.
Editorial Desk9 min read
