Highway Safety: Further Opportunities Exist to Improve Data on Crashes Involving Commercial Motor Vehicles

摘要

Large trucks make up 3 percent of the nations registered vehicles, but they were involved in 11 percent of all fatal crashes in 2003. To reduce the fatality rate, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) sets national safety goals and works in partnership with states to reach them. Crash data collected by states and submitted to FMCSA is key to these efforts, and to be fully useful, this data must be complete, timely, accurate, and collected in a consistent manner. GAO addressed (1) what is known about the quality of commercial motor vehicle crash data, and what states are doing to improve it, and (2) the results of FMCSA's efforts to help states make improvements.