And now, traffic and transit on the twos. An accident involving a large tractor-trailer truck . . . on I-95 southbound near . . . is causing a five-mile backup. Emergency medical crews are en route. Only one lane is open. On Route 42, another 18-wheeler has jackknifed. All lanes will remain closed for several hours.
Joseph Valentino, a former Delaware County, Pa., auto mechanic who became a computer repairman, thinks he has come up with a way to drastically reduce truck accidents like these. He thinks he can save 1,000 lives and prevent 25,000 injuries and countless traffic snarls each year.
Judging from the reaction of truckers who have seen his invention, he might be right.
“He’s got a hell of a good idea. That’s one of the best safety items I’ve seen,” said Larry Knicely of Zanesville, Ohio, in an interview at the Petro Truck Stop in Bordentown, N.J., after he had watched Valentino demonstrate his idea.
Valentino’s idea is an automatic remote-control mirror that virtually eliminates blind spots along the right side of a truck, where government studies say nearly 24,000 crashes occur each year, during lane changes and right turns. On top of that, 8,600 times a year, a truck causes significant damage while backing up, and Valentino figures his mirror can help there, too.
His mirror is one of two products being introduced this summer to address the truck blind-spot problem. The other is a collision warning system developed and sold by Eaton Vorad Technologies, of Kalamazoo, Mich., a unit of Eaton Corp.
The warning system uses radar to detect vehicles alongside or in the path of a truck. The basic unit sells for about $2,600. The most elaborate version, which costs $3,000 and is now available only on certain new trucks, is linked to the cruise control. It automatically adjusts the truck’s speed to prevent rear-ending vehicles in the lane ahead.
Eaton Vorad says it has improved its detection system so rain, snow and roadside guardrails no longer set off false alarms that tempt drivers to turn off or ignore the system.
Valentino’s $1,295 mirror combines off-the-shelf technology that has been around a good while. It works like this: A rugged rubber wheel and a sensing device that measures turns of the wheel is attached to the truck’s trailer hitch, called “the fifth wheel.” When a trailer is attached, this small wheel presses against the bottom of the trailer. As the truck turns, trailer movement turns the wheel. This sends an electronic signal to the right-side mirror, causing it to turn out. So, instead of the side of the trailer, which the driver would see with an ordinary mirror, the driver continues to see what’s alongside and behind the trailer. When the truck straightens out, the mirror returns to the normal position.
Another feature, called Lane Scan, lets the driver press a button, usually placed on the gear shift, and move the mirror to scan adjacent lanes. When the button is released, the mirror returns to its normal position.
Still another feature helps drivers detect a developing jackknife situation, when there are critical seconds to take corrective action, Valentino said. When the brakes are applied, if the trailer begins to slide around to either side, an alarm sounds.
The neat thing about all this, said Gino Ferrari of Waterbury, Conn., who has been on the road for 14 years, is that it costs less than the deductible on most truckers’ insurance policies.
“It’ll pay for itself,” said Ferrari, who owns his own big rig and spends three weeks on the road at a time. “It would be a good investment for fleets, particularly those that hire inexperienced drivers.”
The trucking industry has spent millions trying to educate motorists to stay out of areas where truck drivers can’t see.
They have sent truckers and their rigs to schools and civic clubs, letting people sit in the driver’s seat and see that a trucker can’t see some things. And they’ve painted big signs on trucks and bought advertising to help get this point across.
“Still, cars don’t look out for you; you have to look out for them,” Ferrari said.
Knicely, the Ohio trucker, agrees: “Turn on the right-turn signal, and people will try to race you to get by. . . . The right side is where most accidents happen.”
For most of his two decades on the road, Knicely has averaged 100,000 miles a year. Now, he has cut back to 75,000 miles a year, bringing candy to Philadelphia, making 12 to 20 stops a week, and backing into tight loading docks.
Backing into all those docks would be a lot easier with Valentino’s mirror, he said.
Like Ferrari, Knicely believes the jackknife warning would be most beneficial to younger drivers. “After many years on the road, you develop a rapport with the truck. I can’t explain it. You just feel it when things are about to go wrong.”
He and others interviewed at the truck stop say Valentino’s mirror system is more likely than complex electronics devices to hold up, as Knicely put it, “under the miles and miles of ice and snow, of grit and grime” that truckers encounter.
The idea that is now becoming a business popped into Valentino’s head more than a decade ago, when he was stuck in traffic behind a truck trying to make a tight turn. The driver kept having to climb down out of the cab and walk around to see where things were, Valentino recalls.
Watching all this for about 20 minutes, Valentino began to form his idea. His background included working as an auto mechanic, attending a trade school, and, for five years, working for International Business Machiens Corp., “repairing typewriters, fax machines, printers, all kinds of electromechanical equipment.”
He found he could go nowhere with IBM because he lacked a college degree, so he quit and started Valens Office Machines, in Holmes, Pa.
“I was too busy running the business to do anything about the idea at first.”
Then, in 1994, he sold Valens.
Valentino used money from selling his business and a small group of investors to design and build prototypes. He got a commercial driver’s license and bought a 1970 tractor-trailer to test a prototype. Eventually, he put 10 prototypes on the road and will soon have 20 more in use.
With sons Joseph Jr. and Frank, he has formed a new ARCM Corp. (as in Automatic Remote-Controlled Mirror) and has contracted with a major supplier of mirrors to make that part of the device. He’s lining up local machine shops to make the rest.
By fall, Valentino hopes to begin selling the lane-scan device, which can be used on 18-wheelers, school buses, local delivery vans and trucks and recreational vehicles. An upgrade, which adds the automatic turning feature for 18-wheelers, will be ready by spring, he said.
Valentino plans to sell to truck manufacturers and through dealers and truckstops.
He has combed pounds of government documents on the number of trucks that might use his product, and the number and cost of the accidents it might prevent.
There are 2.5 million 18-wheelers on the road that can use the whole system, including the jackknife warning, Valentino said. There are 35 million to 40 million more trucks and buses that could use the LaneScan device, and about 60 million additional trucks, vans, buses and recreational vehicles that could use a smaller version of LaneScan.
With numbers like that, Valentino said, he figures he and his investors will make a bundle from the idea he had while stuck in traffic.
