Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration sent its top officials to Tennessee this week to learn more about how that state safety program is successfully cutting truck-related fatalities.

Education and outreach could be the answers to lowering deaths, the officials said. In Tennessee, 17 specially trained officers regularly visit trucking companies and offer advice on state and federal regulation compliance. The officers demonstrate vehicle inspection procedures, assist with paperwork and help train new drivers. The officers also offer educational programs about how passenger vehicles can safely share the road with big trucks to schools, civic organizations and other community groups.
The program impressed Jerry Cooper, Southern field administrator for the federal agency. "They've established a true partnership, a trust, with the (trucking) industry," Cooper told the Associated Press. "The results are self-evident."
Tennessee's program was implemented in 1997. Truck fatalities in the state went from 175 in 1996 to 146 in 1997 and 128 in 1998. They went up to 185 in 1999, but declined again last year to 163. Before the new policy was instituted, Tennessee's truck safety program mainly consisted of surprise inspections and little else.
Federal officials said their goal is to reduce truck-related fatalities by 50 percent in the next 10 years. Cooper said plans modeled after Tennessee's probably will be tried in other states within two years.