As comic Tracy Morgan remains hospitalized from a crash involving an allegedly exhausted trucker, US Sen. Charles Schumer says the feds have to speed up efforts to keep tired drivers off the road.
Schumer (D-NY) said the federal Department of Transportation should begin quickly requiring “black boxes” in large trucks to record any travel logged by their drivers.
With only paper tracking available now, “there’s a huge incentive to falsify the records,” Schumer said Sunday.
“The devices are simple, they’re not expensive, we use them all the time in different places and it makes sense to do it here,” Schumer said.
Prosecutors have said Walmart truck driver Kevin Roper hadn’t slept for at least 24 hours before he barreled into the back of Morgan’s limo June 7.
Morgan and two other men were critically injured, and comic James “Jimmy Mack” McNair was killed in the crash.
“It’s safe to say that fatigue played a deadly role in the crash,” Schumer said. “And if this were the only time that fatigue played a role in a crash, we’d say OK, but it regularly does.”
Sean McNally of the American Trucking Association said he expects electronic logging devices will become mandatory by year’s end.