Introduction

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 2001. 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:

FARS, GES, and MCMIS describe the events and details of motor vehicle crashes, but they do not include data on crash causation or fault.

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 2001 in the context of available historical data for past years. In the other chapters, the 2001 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: