Qualifiying Core Carriers

ATRI to Test Rollover Notification System

This Story Appears in Feb. 3 Edition of Transport Topics.

The American Transportation Research Institute said it will soon begin testing a system that warns truck drivers as they near a stretch of highway where significant numbers of rollovers have occurred.

ATRI and a group of telematics providers will begin testing in about two months, after recruiting carriers that frequently travel through some of the nation’s worst rollover sites, which have been identified in Iowa, Montana, Kansas and Georgia.”We want to find folks who are not random to the corridors,” said Daniel

The notification system employs geofencing — electronically establishing two points that intersect, one the moving truck, the other a fixed geographic locationWhen the truck enters the fixed danger zone, a warning will sound on the in-cab communications system, Murray said. The system also will be tested on smart phones.

For the test, the researchers and the telematics providers plan to have the warning sound at about 600 to 800 feet before a truck enters a highway spot where rollovers are frequent,

The warning system is the outgrowth of a study ATRI first published in 2012 after analyzing more than 50,000 police reports on rollover crashes in 31 states between 2001 and 2009.The ongoing study pinpoints the locations with frequent rollover crashes and produces state maps of where rollovers have occurred most often.

Rollovers are particularly deadly and costly for trucking. Fifty-two percent of all large-truck occupant fatalities in 2009 involved a rollover, ATRI said. When a rollover results only in property damage, the average cost is $197,000, and that figure increases to more than $1.1 million when there’s a fatality, ATRI said.