Road kill.

• Author: Lerner, Preston
• Position: Relaxing of laws for truck drivers

"We're lawbreakers. We've got to be," Ron Vanderburg says defiantly as he stands by his raucusly idling Peterbilt in the vast Union 76 truck stop in Ontario, California. After 41 years driving a big rig, he knows how the game works. "The [trucking company] dispatchers don't give a damn how you get there, how many laws you break, how many hours you run, how much dope you take, just as long as you get there when you're supposed to."

The statistics support Vandenburg's gloomy assessment. Odds are the 18-wheeler belching smoke in the next lane is speeding. The driver has probably driven as many as 100 hours in the past week, flagrantly violating federal safety regulations. There's a one-in-three chance that his truck couldn't pass a safety inspection. What's more, it's likely that the owner knows it. And, for that matter, so do the civil servants charged with enforcing truck safety.

Despite romantic associations with the lure of the open road and hearty self-reliance, truckers have gradually become wage slaves squeezed between a rock and a hard place--namely, the bosses who hire them and the bureaucrats who regulate them. Largely overworked and underpaid, they're also in increasingly short supply. With financial considerations chasing veteran (read safer) drivers off the road, one study suggests that the industry will need 500,000 new (read more dangerous) drivers every year through the end of the century.

And make no mistake: This isn't somebody else's problem. When a truck crashes, the one person most likely not to be killed is the guy behind the wheel. Medium and heavy-duty trucks--those with a gross vehicle weight of more than 10,000 pounds--were involved in 4,500 fatal accidents in 1991. Of the 5,200 people killed in these crashes, only 13.7 percent were riding in the truck. In other words, nearly nine out of every 10 victims in truck-related fatalities were in a car or on foot. Which is why the rest of us have a vested interest in making sure those big rigs are operated safely.

Among working truckers, at least, there's no question that our highways are more dangerous than they used to be, and they're getting more dangerous every day. And what is the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Motor Carrier Safety (OMCS)--the agency charged with overseeing and enforcing truck safety--doing about it? It's trying to slash the number of safety regulations on the books. The feds call this program "a zero-base review"; safety advocates call it cause for alarm. OMCS officials have proposed a new rule, for instance, that would extend the...