Friday’s Inside Look by Brooks – Spring 2019 Scholarships!
On this Friday’s episode of Inside Look by Brooks, Steve Brooks announces our Spring 2019 scholarship information.
This semester’s contest topic will be on the the recent rise in semi truck collision fatalities, the newest in safety technology, and why trucks today aren’t required by law to have the new tech.
The application deadline: May 3rd, 2019
Awards announced: May 17th, 2019
For more information, you can visit our Student Scholarship page on our website at: https://brookslawgroup.com/about/…
Transcript
Good afternoon! Steve Brooks here with Friday’s Inside Look by Brooks. It is a beautiful Friday afternoon here in the middle part of Florida and today I wanted to announce the 2019 Spring Scholarship topic.
The scholarship contest is something near and dear to my heart just because it’s exciting to see the involvement of the youth in the high schools and colleges who participate and submit their work. It’s just so fun to read that and so it’s a feel good thing for me personally. The application deadline is May 3rd and then the awards will be announced May 17th.
Essay Topic
We’ve written a few blog articles about this, but this statistic is totally startling to me. In 2016, more than 4,300 people were killed in collisions with semi tractor trailers. That’s a 28%, almost a 30%, increase from 2009, and we’re getting these statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, so they’re real. That’s an unbelievable statistic; it’s scary. So here is kind of where the issue is heading: we all have probably been exposed to the new technology in cars. You know, the brakes that automatically stop when the car in front of you stops.
More and more cars are being equipped with this kind of technology and even certain models, like Tesla, you can auto-drive without really participating at all as a driver. The car industry has really done a great job of kind of self-regulating themselves and imposing deadlines to implement this safety technology. And quite honestly, as a personal injury attorney, I see that technology in the future creating less and less cases for personal injury attorneys. For me that may be bad, and I’m a lawyer, I can do a lot of different areas of law, but for the consuming public, that is fantastic and we’re excited about that.
NHTSA and the Government
What is very troubling though is– while the new safety technology such as the automatic emergency braking and forward collision warning systems are standard on cars, only a small fraction of semis on the roads today have this technology. The NHTSA is the federal regulatory body that is in charge of keeping Americans safe on the highways, and they have really failed to make any regulations requiring these safety features on these large vehicles.
So, the essay question is this: Should semi and large trucks be required by law to have the latest in safety technology? Why do you think the trucking industry and the federal government have resisted attempts to require safety features on semi trucks?
What’s the Hold-Up?
This is such an interesting topic to me. I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect that it may involve a big industry, a very powerful lobbying industry of the trucking industry. So, if you know a senior in high school or someone currently in college or planning to go to college, please forward this YouTube video to them. Tell them about our scholarship contest.
We look forward to those submissions, and I look forward to learning from those submissions because this is truly a question that is unanswered.
Thank you for joining me today, and next week we’re going to be back on our regular topics and focusing on truck accidents. Hope everybody has a wonderful and safe weekend. If you have any questions about anything, you can always email me: steve(at)brookslawgroup.com. So don’t forget to let your high school seniors and college students know about this scholarship contest and if you go to our website (brookslawgroup.com) and search for the scholarship page, all this will be posted there.
So thanks again for joining, and we’ll see you next week!
