This annual edition of Large Truck Crash Facts (previously published by the Federal Highway Administration, Office of Motor Carriers, as Large Truck Crash Profile: The National Picture) contains descriptive statistics about fatal, injury, and property damage only crashes involving large trucks in 1999. Selected crash statistics on passenger vehicles are also presented for comparison purposes.

Data Sources

The information in this report was compiled by the Analysis Division of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). The major sources for the data are described below:

• Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). FARS, maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), is a census of fatal crashes involving motor vehicles traveling on public trafficways. FARS is recognized as the most reliable national crash database, but it contains information only on fatal crashes. A large truck is defined in FARS as a truck with a gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) of more than 10,000 pounds.

• General Estimates System (GES). GES, also maintained by NHTSA, is a probability-based nationally representative sample of all police-reported fatal, injury, and property damage only crashes. The data from GES yield national estimates, calculated using a weighting procedure, but cannot give State-level estimates. Also, GES is a sample of motor vehicle crashes, and the results generated are estimates. For this reason, all GES data shown in this report are rounded to the nearest thousand. The GES definition of a large truck is the same as the FARS definition.

• Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS) Crash File. The MCMIS Crash File, maintained by FMCSA, contains data on trucks and buses in crashes that meet the National Governors’ Association (NGA) recommended threshold. An NGA reportable crash must involve a truck (a vehicle that is designed, used, or maintained primarily for carrying property and has at least two axles and six tires) or a bus (a vehicle with seats for at least 16 people, including the driver). The crash must result in either at least one fatality, at least one injury for which the injured person was taken to a medical facility for immediate medical attention, or at least one vehicle that was towed from the scene as a result of disabling crash damage. The crashes are reported by the States to FMCSA through the SAFETYNET computer software.


The MCMIS Crash File is intended to be a census of trucks and buses involved in fatal, injury and towaway crashes; however, some States do not report all NGA-eligible crashes. For 1999, States reported 96,453 trucks involved in crashes through SAFETYNET to the MCMIS Crash File. Based on the 1999 GES data, an estimated 163,000 trucks were involved in crashes that should have been reported. Thus, FMCSA received reports on about 60 percent of the trucks involved in NGA-reportable crashes.

Highway Statistics

Highway Statistics is an annual publication of the Office of Highway Policy Information of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). State agencies report the data, ranging from driver licensing to highway finance, and FHWA aggregates them to get national totals. This report takes vehicle miles traveled and vehicle registrations from Table VM-1, “Annual Vehicle Distance Traveled in Miles and Related Data” of Highway Statistics.

Organization of the Report

This year’s report is organized into four chapters: Trends, Crashes, Vehicles, and People. The Trends chapter shows data for 1999 in the context of available historical data for past years. In the other chapters, the 1999 data are shown in different ways, according to what is being counted. The Crashes chapter counts numbers of crashes; the Vehicles chapter counts vehicles in crashes; and the People chapter counts persons of all types involved in crashes. Four different types of counts are shown:

• Crashes: Numbers of crashes involving various vehicle types.

• Vehicles in Crashes: Numbers of vehicles involved in crashes. These counts may be larger than the number of crashes (fatal, injury, or property damage only), because more than one vehicle may be involved in a single crash.

• People in Crashes: Numbers of people killed or injured in crashes. These counts generally are larger than the number of crashes (fatal or injury), because more than one person may be killed or injured in a single crash. People killed or injured may be occupants of a truck, occupants of another vehicle, or nonmotorists (pedestrians or pedalcyclists).

• Drivers in Crashes: Numbers of vehicle drivers involved in crashes. These counts generally are equal to the numbers of vehicles involved in crashes.