Highway Safety Leaders Deliver Life-Saving Measures as Part of Nevada Truck Driving Championships

Life-saving highway driving tips were presented today as part of the American Trucking Associations' national Share the Road highway safety tour by top professional truck drivers and other safety partners. The Share the Road educational program also served as a kick-off to the 2008 Nevada Truck Driving Championships.

With families hitting the highways for summer vacations, sharing the road safely takes on special significance this month. Congressman Dean Heller, the American Trucking Associations, the Nevada Motor Transport Association, the Federal Motor Carriers Association, the Nevada Highway Patrol and members of the trucking community joined the elite group of drivers to discuss highway safety on Nevada highways and to give tips for safe summer driving. The Reno stop demonstrated to drivers how to share the road safely with large trucks.

"Highway safety is a way of life," said Clarence Jenkins, a professional driver for UPS Freight and 13-time State Truck Driving Champion. "The drivers competing here in Reno have dedicated their lives to being safe professional drivers. I hope my years of experience behind the wheel of a truck can help the motoring public be a little safer out on our nation's roads."

Featured at today's event were professional truck drivers Jerry Adams (C&S Wholesale Grocers) and Clarence Jenkins (UPS Freight). These drivers are members of an elite team of million-mile, accident-free truck drivers who deliver the trucking industry's safety messages across the country.

Nevada Motor Transport Association CEO Paul Enos said at the event, "The truck driving championships are a celebration of the industry's safety program. It is great to have another fundamental part of trucking's safety outreach - the Share the Road program - here to teach motorists how to share the road with tractor-trailers. Through efforts like the ones we are highlighting today, the trucking industry is working to make America's roads the safest they have ever been."

Today's presentation of Share the Road safety measures is important to area motorists because, according to statistics:

* An average of 400 people are killed each year on Nevada roads (Dept. of Transportation).

* Around three quarters of all truck-involved fatalities are unintentionally initiated by car drivers (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration).

* 35 percent of all truck-involved highway fatalities occur in a truck's blind spots
(Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration).


Following the safety demonstration today at the Nevada Truck Driving Championships, reporters, photographers and state legislators were given tractor-trailer rides. From the truck driver's perspective they viewed safe merging and stopping distances, and learned up close and personal some of the differences between how cars and large trucks operate on the highways. Today's demonstration was designed to teach specific skills in order for motorists to drive safely around other automobiles and around trucks on the highways, so that they arrive safely at their destinations.