Enterprise Fleet recap: Better safety equipment, worse safety outcomes

Rick Larkin, the yellow safety vest guy, explains why trucking safety isn’t improving

John Kingston, FreightWaves (l); Rick Larkin, BCB Transport (r)

This fireside chat recap is from the FreightWaves Enterprise Fleet Summit.

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Improving safety equipment, worse safety outcomes

DETAILS: The amount of new safety equipment on the roads is growing by leaps and bounds. Then why are many measures of highway safety deteriorating?

SPEAKER:  Rick Larkin, chief information officer, BCB Transport

BIO: Rick Larkin, after starting BCB Transport, has moved into a more public-facing role as chief information officer. His videos on YouTube under BCB Live have drawn a large audience. And while he discusses many aspects of trucking on those videos, safety is a key concern. When BCB was formed in 2011, it took its three-letter name from what it described as its core values: Be Safe, Communicate, and if you can, Be On-Time.

KEY QUOTES FROM LARKIN:  

“Every second, every mile, the driver’s situation around him or her is different than it was a mile ago.”

“What we see in these big crashes is that this is where the truck driver must get help from the trucking company to inform them of impending weather and road conditions.”

“Even at a 10-truck operation there was nothing more important than saving lives.”

“We can’t be afraid to pay a subscription fee to somebody to alert us when they’re going into bad weather.”

More articles by John Kingston

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.