A RAILWAY sponsored study that blackens the name of US
truck safety has been debunked by Daniel Blower, research scientist at the
University of Michigan, who described the report's methodology as fatally
flawed.
"Fatalities are miscounted. The errors are
substantial and not recoverable," said Mr Blower of the report produced by
the Multimodal Transportation & Infrastructure Consortium for the Railway
Supply Institute.
"It has been demonstrated to a reasonable certainty
the crash analysis suffered from numerous fatal errors. Trucks are
misclassified," said Mr Blower, an expert on truck safety and truck crash
data.
The re-examination of the rail-sponsored study was done
at the request of the American Trucking Associations (ATA), reported the
American Journal of Transportation.
Said ATA president Bill Graves: "Trucking's critics
have no qualms about stretching, sometimes well past the breaking point, data
and arguments to smear our industry."
Said Mr Blower: "All the numbers in the tables are
seriously wrong. In the process of trying to understand how the authors could
have got the numbers so wrong, I found fundamental errors of analysis and
evaluation."
Errors included misleading labelling of tables and data,
misclassification of truck types, analytical techniques that resulted in errors
like double-counting of fatal injuries.
"In the end, I found errors and misconceptions
serious enough to undermine any validity to the crash rate analysis," Mr
Blower said.
Source : HKSG.
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