Anytime I’m driving down the highway behind a semitruck, I look for the horizontal metal bar that spans the space underneath the trailer. It makes me feel a bit safer. And it reminds me of Jayne Mansfield.
She was a well-known film actress who died in a traffic accident in Louisiana in 1967. Her car rear-ended an 18-wheeler and slid underneath the trailer. The top of the car was demolished, killing Mansfield and the driver. The coroner reported that the upper portion of her skull “was severed,” though it was widely believed she had been decapitated.
The wreck had another notable consequence: those bars on truck trailers, known as underride guards. Most drivers probably take them for granted, if they notice them at all.
Those used in 1967, though, were not much use, and it took the horrific death of a celebrity to bring better ones into operation.
Mansfield’s accident spurred federal highway officials to propose a new requirement. But trucking interests managed to block action, arguing that it was “fundamentally unfair to place all of the onus on the innocent party, the truck, to protect the driver of the impacting vehicle.” A new mandate had to wait until 1996. Since then, these bars have become a ubiquitous feature of the highway landscape, a mundane innovation that has saved many lives.
But similar accidents and deaths continue to happen. That’s because the underride guards are required only in the rear — and in many crashes, cars slide underneath the side or front of these trailers.
A group of families of people killed hopes to spare other Americans from unnecessary deaths in such accidents. Among them is Marianne Karth, who lost two daughters when their car was knocked under a semitrailer. She and Lois Durso-Hawkins, whose daughter died in another underride accident, founded STOP Underrides, which is part of a coalition of safety groups lobbying Congress to enhance protections.
The STOP Underrides Act, sponsored by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., would require underride guards on the side and front of new tractor-trailers and other large trucks. These devices would address what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration refers to as the “geometrical mismatch” between tractor-trailers and lower-slung passenger vehicles. The bill would also stiffen standards on rear guards.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has carried out test crashes that dramatize the danger. Those in which a car slams into the side of an 18-wheeler without a side guard are hard to watch. The underside of the trailer slices through the windshield of the car before smashing the heads of the test dummies. Air bags and seat belts are no help. In the crashes with trucks equipped with guards, by contrast, the passenger compartment and its occupants remain intact.
Federal data shows between 1994 and 2018, more than 6,000 car occupants died in underride accidents with large trucks. Additional guards could mean the difference between life and death, or between serious injury and none, for hundreds each year.
So, who could oppose the idea? The American Trucking Associations. Dan Horvath, vice president for safety policy, told me that the guards would be an expensive burden that would divert investment from better safety improvements and possibly cause trucks to get hung up at railroad crossings.
But the advocates have made a huge concession on the cost issue by limiting the rule to new vehicles, dropping plans to cover those already on the road. After-market side guards would cost less than $3,000, and building them into new trailers would undoubtedly reduce that figure. Keep in mind that a new rig typically goes for between $125,000 and $175,000.
As for the alleged practical drawbacks, side underride guards have long been required in European Union countries, without noticeably hampering the trucking industry. The Globalist magazine reports that trucks carry a larger share of freight in Europe than they do here — but have a lower rate of fatal accidents.
Anytime a car and a 40-ton semi collide, the car will inevitably get the worst of the exchange. That’s a physical reality. But deaths from underrides happen even though they are easily preventable. That’s a political failure.
