Truckers' troubles: safety on a less open road

When he leaves his Edgar, Wisc., home, his '97 Peterbilt rumbling beneath him, Joe Rajkovacz remembers what drew him to the big-rig business: running like a freebird on the open highway, from the two lanes out to Rapid City, S.D., across Wyoming, through the slick rock canyons of Utah, straight to San Francisco.

But these days, it's traffic that dominates as much as the scenery: more congestion, more trucks, and a convoy of tired and inexperienced drivers who cause more accidents than they should. It's a set of problems that was highlighted last week, when one stretch of road in Pennsylvania saw three truck accidents in a single day. And the combination of woes is fueling public resentment of truckers, whose rigs are involved in nearly 5,000 American fatalities each year.

"There's been a fundamental shift in Americans' attitudes toward truckers," says Mr. Rajkovacz, a driver who says he's logged 3 million accident-free miles. "We're no longer the 'knights of the road.'"

In fact, these days they may be feeling more like serfs. As concern grows about safety on the nation's highways, the federal government is considering tapping new technology to track drivers' hours, and educating the public on sharing the roads. There are already federal limits on the length of time truckers can sit behind the wheels of their big rigs, called maximum "hours of service" (HOS) - rules that, truckers admit, are commonly flouted.

Now government officials are pushing for a black box in every truck to ensure compliance. But the truckers themselves, one of the nation's most famously independent groups, are resisting what they see as the government riding shotgun.

To critics, it's not simply invasive; it's emblematic of a system at its wits' end, struggling with high turnover rates and fueled by stiff competition among thousands of companies that have their truckers working up to 100 hours a week. Moreover, companies are relying more and more on inexperienced drivers and new immigrants. As cars and trucks duke it out on asphalt trade routes, the controversy highlights the human costs of delivering goods on the cheap.

"The goal since deregulation has been to lower the cost of transportation to drive economic activity," says Peter Swan, a transportation expert at Penn State's Smeal College of Business in University Park, Pa. "That worked fine up to a point. Unfortunately, we're at that point."

While total trucking has grown by nearly 70 percent in the past 15 years, new highway spending has lagged. And while safety has improved dramatically on the whole, growing traffic on the nation's highways is raising new concerns.

"The amount of trucks is tremendous, almost incredible," says John Rudolph, a Virginia motorist who battles I-81 traffic daily. "I've never seen so many trucks."

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