Advancing Highway Safety Nationwide

The Trucking Alliance

The Alliance for Driver Safety & Security, also known as the Trucking Alliance, is a nonpartisan coalition of freight, logistics and supporting business partners. The Trucking Alliance vision is to advance safety reforms that can reduce and ultimately achieve zero large truck crash fatalities.

Statement by Steve Williams, Co-Founder and President of The Trucking Alliance; Chairman & CEO of Maverick USA

June 2024

“My exposure to trucking came at a very early age.  Both my grandfathers and my dad drove trucks for a living. These men were my heroes and I’ve spent my career attempting to emulate their character and work ethic; to restore the image and prestige of the professional truck driver.

“Our nation’s supply chain cannot function without commercial truck drivers. If the supply chain breaks down, so does our economy and the standard of living we enjoy. In fact, we saw this with the COVID pandemic.

“But millions of truck drivers operate their equipment within a few feet of cars containing our friends and family. For that reason, we have the ethical and moral responsibility to make sure that all commercial truck drivers are well-trained, well-rested, and drug and alcohol-free.

“Operating a motor carrier or tractor-trailer isn’t an entitlement but a privilege. With privileges come responsibilities.   For example, how can we deliver many more goods on much more congested highways, without compromising safety? One way, perhaps the only way, is to embrace new safety technologies combined with improved driver training.

“We’re making progress.

• The Trucking Alliance was the leading advocate for requiring electronic logging devices to verify a driver’s on-duty hours: a new technology that replaced the outdated paper logbooks that truck drivers often falsified enabling them to spend too many hours behind the wheel.
• We persuaded Congress to create a drug and alcohol clearinghouse so that employers can know if a driver applicant has previously failed a drug test.
• In 2015, we were successful in getting a hair drug test approved for DOT protocols, in lieu of the less effective urine test.
• And in 2021, we advanced bipartisan legislation that will require automatic emergency braking on all new large trucks.

“These technologies coupled with practical regulatory changes will help truck drivers mitigate and even avoid large truck crashes. There is every reason to believe that the commercial trucking industry can achieve a record of zero fatalities, just as the commercial airline industry is doing.

“Thousands of lives can be saved each year, if we adopt a philosophy to embrace safety reforms that make sense for our country first, our industry second, and our companies third.

“In 2024, the Trucking Alliance will continue its mission, to advance federal policies that create a safer environment for our commercial drivers and the motorists with whom they share the roadways.”