Charleston, W.Va. (June 7, 2016) – Today, the West Virginia Trucking Association expressed appreciation to the thousands of professional truck drivers, dispatchers, technicians and other members of the trucking industry in the state for their commitment to improving highway safety.

"June is National Safety Month, and as a safety-first industry, the many hard-working dedicated members of the trucking industry deserve to be commended for their efforts to make our roads safer," said West Virginia Trucking Association President Jan Vineyard. "Our industry spends more than $7 billion annually on safety-related training, technology and equipment nationally – and that investment is paying off in a big way."

Since 2004, truck-involved fatal crashes are down 21% nationally and since the industry was economically deregulated in 1980, those crashes are down 32% and the crash rate per 100 million miles has been cut an astonishing 74%.

"Our industry is benefiting from improvements in technology, but also from the hard work and dedication of our professional drivers," Vineyard said. "Advances in active safety technology and other devices have benefits, which is why our industry has been voluntarily investing in such systems. However, the most important safety investment our industry makes is in the men and women behind the wheel."

"The American Trucking Associations, along with help from the West Virginia Trucking Association, has been at the forefront of pushing for common-sense rules to improve safety," Vineyard noted. "From pushing for the drug and alcohol clearinghouse rule and a mandate for electronic logging devices to calling on states to reduce speed limits and for a requirement for commercial vehicles to be electronically speed limited, our industry believes strong, data-supported rules will help us improve highway safety even more in the future."