WASHINGTON A coalition of safety advocates has blasted the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for its regulatory oversight, and included the bus industry in its call for improved commercial vehicle safety enforcement.

Meeting in Washington for a four-day conference, crash victims who are members of the Truck Safety Coalition an umbrella group for Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways and Parents Against Tired Truckers joined with representatives of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and Public Citizen to give the FMCSA a series of failing grades on critical safety issues.

The group also asked the FMCSA to:

* Mandate the use of electronic onboard recorders for every truck and bus to improve safety enforcement and prevent cheating on driver hours of service rules.

* Deny any special interest exemptions to the federal hours-of-service rule affecting truck and bus drivers.

* Reject any rollback in safety regulations that would allow "special interest" exemptions to federal truck size and weight laws or the freeze on longer combination vehicles, such as triple trailer trucks. Congress is considering a possible pilot project that would allow some trucks to exceed the federal 80,000-pound gross vehicle weight limit on U.S. highways.

* Prohibit the opening of the southern border to Mexico-based trucks until all federal safety requirements have been met. The Bush Administration has announced it will open the U.S. southern border to 100 long-haul interstate companies from Mexico.

* Require speed governors on all trucks to regulate how fast they can travel.

"For years the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has routinely failed to meet deadlines to implement mandated safety rules and regulations that would have surely prevented deadly big truck crashes," said Daphne Izer, who founded Parents Against Tired Truckers in 1994 after her 17-year-old son and four of his friends were killed on the Maine Turnpike when a tired trucker feel asleep at the wheel.

The coalition also released a report identifying the states with the highest rates of truck crash deaths. Wyoming had the highest number of deadly truck crashes, with 6.09 deaths per 100,000 people. The other states with the highest truck crash death rates were Arkansas (4.17), Oklahoma (3.41), New Mexico (3.27), Mississippi (3.12), West Virginia (3.03), Kentucky (2.97), Kansas (2.91), South Carolina (2.91), and Missouri (2.86). The complete report can be found at www.trucksafety.org.

Repeatedly in recent months, the U.S. Department of Transportation has pointed out that the large truck fatality rate has declined during the past decade. Since 1996, truck vehicle miles traveled have increased by more than 24 percent, while the number of large truck crashes increased by less than 0.1 percent.