right now. ability to interact with the saudi's will be greater if they can deliver a deal and substantially less if they cannot. >> with that, i am afraid we are running out of time. secretary burns schedule is quite tight. ask you toou, can i grab a drink and a box lunch and get back to your seat and we will start promptly. [applause] >> on monday, we will hear more about foreign policy in the elsewhere from bobby jindal of louisiana. he will speak on the issue of the american enterprise institute in washington. that is live monday at 11:00 eastern on c-span. that same day we will take you

live to the canadian house of commons where stephen harper and his cabinet will address members about canada's role in the fight against isis. unveiling a plan that will include airstrikes in iraq. that will be live at monday -- monday at 2:00 eastern on c-span. at nineweekend, tonight :00 easter, the founder and former chair of microsoft on the africairus outbreak in and sunday evening, the director of the director of this money and -- smithsonian doctor to medical tonight at 10:00 on book tvs afterwards. of the republican party. live sunday at noon, legal affairs editor in charge at reuters in supreme court filer. today, on american history tv, former fbi agent on catching the uniform or suspect.

sunday afternoon, the 100th anniversary of the panama canal. find the television schedule at www.c-span.org and let us know what you think about the programs you are watching. or you can send us a tweet. join the conversation, like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. look at how the government and u.s. trucking industry are addressing the issue of highway the. this is half an hour. "washington journal" continues. host: our next guess is the transportation reporter from bloomberg news. thank you so much for joining us. guest: thanks for having me. host: tonight start by talking about some of the stats out of the trucking industry. talk about highway safety and some of the new regulations around this sector of the economy. some of them are really

staggering in terms of the number of accidents and fatalities involved with large truck driving. 333,000 trucks are involved in traffic accidents. there were 104,000 total injuries involving large trucks in 2012, 4,000 fatalities. you've written that this is one of the most dangerous fields to work in. what makes this field so dangerous and so deadly? one of the things is it's on the highway with ever growing levels of traffic and congestion. and so that's one element. drivers of the truck themselves die at kind of an alarming rate when compare to other occupations. it's something like seven times igher than the average worker.

but some of the things that profession gerous and also just a topic that's worthy of public discussion is some of the working conditions. so truck drivers tend to work really long hours. ey're limited by federal law to a total of 14 hours work a day. if they hit what most people would consider to be a very high weekly limit, they have to take a mandatory rest break but that limit is 60 hours every seven days or 70 hours over 8 days. and if they hit that limit then they have to take what most people would consider to be like a day off.

to it's 34 hours and that's include two overnight rest periods. host: do we have any sense how much these long hours might be contributing to driver exhaustion and how much that deaths? factoring into guest: so one of the key statistics in this industry is the last year for which we have full data is 2012 and that was 3,9 21 truck-related fatalities. so there is debate over how many of those crashes are related to fatigue. but the best estimates are somewhere between 7% and 13% are related to fatigue. so that's not as high a number as 3900 but it's still a pretty high number. and there's just been the oncern over many decades about

the hours that drivers put in and then when there are some high profile crashes we see that drivers quite often are at the end of their very long work shifts or they just have exceeded or just fallen asleep by phone.can reach us truck drivers, if you are listening on the radio you can -585-3882. 202 majorntioned some of the

cases that might spur the debate over the appropriate amount of rest and work these truck drivers should do. one of then is the accident involving actor tracy morgan. can you tell us what happened in that incident and how much change we might be seeing because of it. guest: that crash got a lot of attention he cousin of the celebrity involved. i think what a caught a lot of people's attention about that and it was in new interstate.major a very typical scenario. it was a construction zone. tracy morgan was in a large sprinter van limousine with a small group of people.

up behinddriver came him and just hit him from a hind. the driver was within the legal but he was right at the end of his 14 hour day. he had not exceeded the limits , i think he was 23 miles away from his destination with about 25 minutes left before he hit the federal time limit. was a question of whether walmart designed this route so that there was so little margin of error, so you may have drivers who were speeding to make it within their legal limits. another thing that has come out about that case is that the driver lived in

delaware but he reported for work in georgia. he told police he was up for 24 hours before the crash. raises questions about how frequent it is that drivers may have to commute 500 miles before and start their work shift what kinds of responsibilities the drivers themselves are taking and what kind of responsibilities the company is taking. to turn to your calls. the first one will be from charleston, west virginia, where joyce's calling. good morning. caller: good morning. in west virginia it seems like every other day there is a crash and fatality because of these semi-trucks. i worked in washington dc and drove back to west virginia many times a year for over 20 years.

i was terrified. a lot of times i could not wait to the next exit he i would be sandwiched between these big trucks. and i feel now there should be separate highways, they should not be a with regular drivers. >> i think the caller raises an interesting point. i hear this a lot from people who drive on the highways with cars. there is a lot of fear of trucks out there. i think a lot of truckers would feel the same way about separate highways. we tend to focus on some of and weramatic crashes

look into some of the circumstances around him. there are a lot of crashes out there that happen every day that people do not pay attention to. to be fair tove truck drivers, it is a very hard job that they do every day. more than half of the crashes involving cars and trucks can be shown that they were not the truck driver's fault. we have a trucker on the line now, dave from indiana. you talk about highway safety, if you want to make the highway safer you take truck drivers and put the on and hourly wage. no truck driver would be breaking the law. right now the incentives for truck drivers, i drove 35 years with hazardous material, large machinery, bulldozers, stuff like that over the rose -- over

the roads. everything is geared for the company to make money, not the driver. i have two or three hours of loading time that i have to log that i do not get paid for. i drive to dallas and i have to give up to free hours that i did not get paid for to unload. 30% of nothing is nothing. then you get to the new place, that is two more hours. in a day and a half i have six hours i do not get paid for. if you are running 50 miles per hour in, that is four hours i do not get paid for. i have to stay up night that stay up all night to break the law. -- stay up all night and break the law. set the other coiled by your truck and they go to lunch, so you are stuck there for an

hour. you can put 60 miles down the road. our waiting for the dem to come back from lunch to put the second coil on your truck so you can drive to detroit. -- for them to come back from lunch to put a second coil and trucks are you can drive to detroit. --ler: on most all of the them islmost all of hi paid by the hour. -- by the mile. you are only earning money if your tires are turning. you hear that a lot when you talk to drivers. abouthe caller raised going to a loading dock and hours,to wait around for that creates tremendous stress for the truck driver because they are not getting paid while they are waiting. usually the waiting is outside of their control.

it is not only costing the money by waiting but adding a lot of pressure to then when they do get on the road because they are going to run up against ease federal time limits. nancy fromis springdale, arkansas. caller: i am hearing some good stuff this morning. i am so glad the driver called in. the only one that disappointed me was the lady who said she is afraid of trucks. i can guarantee the drivers are just as afraid or more afraid of cars and she is a trucks. my husband is driving right now. he is on a load in texas. that hee so many times needs time to rest. and going to get a ticket ruin his driving life if he doesn't have somewhere safe to go. he cannot do that.

to federal regulations have -- they cannot idle. it is 110 degrees in those boxes. that is so wrong. rest ifnnot get any they are freezing cold and they are burning up. host: on twitter -- guest: that is a good point. obviously there are these rules in place. they can be hard to enforce. the airline industry is relatively small and contained. , we have 10s

million large trucks on the road. that is a big deal for federal regulators. industry.re dispersed guest: it is more dispersed. there are not enough cops out there or federal investigators out there to look at every truck all the time. crashes,go into these quite often you find severe maintenance violations that have gone on for many years. that kind of thing would not be allowed in aviation. host: efforts are underway to possibly ease those standards, right you go guest: that is correct.

i think the caller that just called him raised the point. when you talk to truck drivers they do not want more limits theyse in the real world need flexibility. average people look at this and 70 hours a week should be enough. drivereally dangerous to and 80,000 pound vehicle beyond that. host: in other words, truckers are asking for more time so they can log more miles. guest: the latest version of these regulations took effect last year. the summer we sought debate in congress about whether to rolled him back. the trucking industry really would like some tweaks.

especially a 30 hour rest break. they would like some adjustment to that. going to hear from some truckers now. caller: we thank you for this great opportunity. i heard this conversation going on this morning and it has been a great opportunity. i want to share something i have been working on in the past four years. it is an initiative to design -- initiative designed to decrease the overall rates in the industry. this is a program i have been working on for the last four years. the problem is at this point it is being looked at from a financial and more than a

helpful and of how can help the transportation industry. of being ableket to put this initiative to work because i know it will benefit the industry because it will give the truck drivers the chance to actually spend more and less time over the road. they spend more time making sure they are functioning correctly in the job spend more time at home. contractedrking on a basis. >> what is the name of it? caller: --

host: next up is thomas from daytona beach in florida. you are on the air. caller: i have been a truck driver for 32 years. i have probably 4 million miles. the point i want to make is with the wage laws our government has , here in the united states if you are a truck driver you don't get paid overtime. you are one of the few people in the united states of america that if you do 14 hours per day you do get that you do not get

any overtime for that. -- 14 hours per day you do not get any overtime for that. the truckingo make companies adhere to safety rules, just make him pay overtime. -- just make them pay overtime. you would be surprised. great i think it is a point. there is an initiative that is , and obama administration bill called the crow america act. it does -- the grow america act. it hasn't gotten very far.

sometimes these ideas have to be that is -- oute there. that is the space everybody should be watching. host: next is kevin from iowa, who is also a chapter. -- also a chucker. -- a trucker. aller: when we are loaded we gh 80,000 pounds. pull --n chicago would

they don't understand that we cannot stop on a dime. when we are driving down the cap highway -- driving down the you are doing everything you can to keep that truck in your lane. windy, the wind just .akes that truck and moves it we are doing everything to keep .he truck in the lane we are hauling a lot of weight

behind that truck. commentant to make a that the federal government wants to put electronic logbooks in the trucks. few places have electronic logbooks. electronic logbooks, if you are cannot pull over on the side of the road and sleep there for overnight. can you talk about these electronic logbooks? guest: that is one of the issues that is pending. it is almost imminent in washington. the idea has been around for at least 15 years. it is not a technological problem. but it has been a political

problem. think the idea is that we do have these federal regulations .n driving time limits the other places paper logbooks. more of the large companies are going to electronic monitoring systems. all truck drivers have to use electronic locking devices. host: would it potentially shutdown the vehicle or is it more efficient -- guest: my understanding is it shut the truck down. they do not think it is necessary and they think it is an expense they should not have

to bear. host: next up is kevin from scarsdale, new york. caller: i am the owner of a truck repair company for over 40 years. i think there needs to be more deal he stops. when truckers come in they have d.o.t. stops they set up to inspect the vehicles. ,hen one is set up in new york a lot of the trucks that are on -- we are called upon, we cannot stop the truck.

i only have another 30 miles to go. >> when i do investigate crashes and i look at company safety records, this kind of thing does come up. there are tremendous numbers of citations for breaks. what people should keep in mind about trucks is there braking system is complicated. it is not necessarily a critical safety problem. when you see a pattern of violations that the trucks are taken out of service. are somet just there basic maintenance that is not being taken care of. host: next up is tom from iowa.

--ler: mic recap -- my recap my problem was that cars, four wheelers as we would call then, to not have the experience to drive around trucks. 80,000 pounds cannot stop on a dime. when we blow our horns at the m they follow us to a truck stop. wheelers think an 18 has 18 breaks. we don't. we have 10 axles -- or five axles. each axle has a set of brakes. next up is george from maryland, who is also a trucker. you are on the air.

go ahead. caller: i just retired. i have been trucking since the late 60's. the biggest expense was loading and unloading. this is something truckers have no control of. when you go to unload, you have scheduled time. and it is lined up first come first serve. this touchdown on the truckers , and if you're going to put gps is that track their time all of the time, when you do that you are going to put more trucks on the road. would i wonder if george

have a comment about whether being paid for waiting at the loading dock -- would that make a difference? the electronic locking devices, my read is they are coming. that is going to be hard to stop. i wonder if the solution is long along that is along the lines of trying to change the other parts of the equation. host: joe, you are a chucker, what the think about the possibility of being paid at the loading dock? would that change your driving behavior? caller: i run for a union company were all i do is run terminal to terminal. the problem is nobody has touched on the problem of this

trucking industry. changed, yournment have 14 hours from the time you start your day to the end of your day. done, it has forced drivers to run. you have 14 hours. it doesn't matter if you are in a traffic jam, accident, dad weather, no matter what. you have 14 hours to complete that day. these hours of service is going to force you to drive tired. old hours of service, you can get up and finish your truck.

this 14 hours, this is the biggest problem of these hours of service. people believe that if tribes are working more than 14 hours in a day, the possibility of fatigue could go way up. i have heard that when they change it to 14 hours they took away a lot of the flexibility that drivers previously had. that is an interesting question.

caller: if anything is wrong with the truck they get mad at him. a lot of these cars cut the strive -- cuts the truck drivers off. it takes longer to stop. beep our last caller will all from riverview florida, who is a trucker. caller: the biggest problem is when reagan deregulated the , we have toustry have our unions back to take care of our drivers.

host: how unionized is the industry? guest: less and yes -- less and less. companiesa few strong that's just a bunch of different packages put into the same trailer. for the truck load companies, the ones hauling trailers all the way across the country and back, there are a most unions other than ups. host: there have been very large settlements involved going to the victims of some of these accidents. you had one particular case that was quite compelling. can you tell us about it? guest: we ran a story on tuesday and will decided to look in depth at a single crash.

it illustrated a lot of the issues in the trucking industry. they were running a triple trailer in ohio. site was a construction and the driver admitted he fall -- he fell asleep at the scene. by the time he was aware of the situation he tried to break and there was no time. a ford focus pushed it into another truck. ofs crash killed the mother two sons. injured her 12-year-old son, who was sitting in the front seat. then the driver went to jail, which is sort of unusual.

we profiled it in part because the driver and the victim had a very long personal exchange of letters wall the driver was in jail. he got out ofy as jail and recanted what he had said on the scene host: many emotional stories involved in this as well as >> campaign 2014 will be the focus on the next " washington journal." david wasserman will discuss the changes in the house of representatives. we will also hear from political's dry just brian nee nina baer andn it stephen hankin. we will take your phone call and

look for comments on twitter. one of the races listed as a tossup i the cook political report is the one in california's 52nd congressional district. againstres got peters republican challenger carl dimaio. here is a look at the most recent debate. you get all of the special interest that load up these big bills, thousands of pages long and we crowd of the issues people agree on. here we need to secure the border. we need to secure the border first. we need to put resources and accountability behind securing our nation's border, not only so we can prevent an immigration system where people get to run to the front of the mind but for national security issues. who knows who is able to cross

into our border in terms of care -- terrorist groups. border security is a critical progress -- prerequisite. look at the polling. nationally and here in san diego. independents and republicans. members of congress constantly want to put poison pills that become thousands of pages long. they point fingers at each other. i think we should focus on issues where we see great unity. securing the border first should be a single subject bill and i think it would get bipartisan support if we focus on the areas of agreement. >> this is the magic of mr. dimaio trying to confuse the issue. we had a bipartisan approach. they want to virtually double the size of the border patrol. what's republicans and democrats agree on is compromise.

we cannot get a vote because the speaker of the house will not even put it up for a vote. this is something on which everyone agrees. ,he u.s. chamber of commerce farmers and the faith community and tech community all agree. harvardknow the business school says this is one of the most important things we could do to get job creation the economy going. all we need is the speaker to and wes before the house would have immigration reform the next day. >> that was just one of more than 100 debate ccs -- c-span is bringing your. tonight coverage continues with the congressional race and republican ryan think he -- ryan zinke. livell have that for you at eight :00 eastern on c-span.

the congressional hispanic aucus recently held conference in washington. one of the panels included a incussion with women leaders congress. they discussed issues impacting women and the latino community as well as midterm elections. this is one hour 20 minute. >> we are back, and i hope you are finished with lunch, otherwise they told me i had to interrupt you and make sure you and make sure you're paying attention, so i hope that is not the case. thank you for your attention. i hope you enjoyed lunch. today's topic is latino leadership in coverage. we have women who have thatstrated to the country the latino women.

let me remind you to friends and coworkers they can watch this discussion live on the website. you will see it on the screen in a minute. we will be entertaining questions from the audience. pay attention because you will be able to ask questions and encourage you to have them ready. now to our distinguished panel. first of california's 32nd district -- [applause] >> from california california district -- the 30th district.