CVSA Removes English Requirement In Updated Out-of-Service Guidelines

This story appears in the March 16 print edition of Transport Topics.

Roadside inspectors no longer will place Mexican or Canadian commercial vehicle drivers operating in the United States out of service if they are unable to communicate in English, according to new Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance “tolerance guidelines.”

Keppler, photo by CVSA

CVSA said the procedures will go into effect April 1.

Other policy changes in CVSA’s 2015 out-of-service handbook include allowing inspectors to take drivers off the road not only for fatigue but also if they are “likely to become impaired” by fatigue.

Last year’s fatigue guidance simply stated that drivers be placed out of service when they were so fatigued that they “should not continue the trip.”

The changes were approved by CVSA’s board and the majority of the membership, said Stephen Keppler, the group’s executive director. The manual was sent to members earlier this month.

Other additions allow inspectors to take trucks off the road for deficiencies detected in hydraulic and electric brakes, ranging from loose or missing brake caliper mounting bolts to improperly joined lines and hoses.

The manual also instructs inspectors to place trucks out of service for cracks in the mounting angle iron of fifth-wheel coupling devices.

Keppler said the language requirement was removed this year because lacking command of a language does not create an “imminent hazard” or place a driver in “imminent danger of a crash.”

While most of the manual’s changes were not difficult for a majority of the CVSA members to approve, the language change “was hotly debated,” he said.

Some inspectors expressed concerns that a driver unable to understand commands during a roadside inspection could place an officer in danger, he said.

“When you’re under the vehicle checking brakes and other things, if they can’t understand you, they could put the officer in a significant safety-risk scenario,” Keppler said. “But the out-of-service criteria are highway-safety standards, not officer-safety standards,” he added.

For that reason, the organization decided to remove language proficiency as a requirement.

Federal regulations state that, for a commercial vehicle driver to be qualified, he or she must be able to “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries and to make entries on reports and records.”

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration spokesman Duane DeBruyne said there is no conflict between the CVSA out-of-service criteria and federal safety regulations related to English proficiency of drivers.

“While it remains a violation, one that should be recorded — as all violations at the roadside should be recorded — we agree that particular one does not constitute an imminent hazard,” DeBruyne said.

“We’ve been work-studying the issue for over two years,” Keppler said. “There’s been some additional research that’s been done on this, looking at trying to substantiate the link between language proficiency and crash data, but the link has not been established.”

Keppler said inspectors have difficulty interpreting the language-proficiency regulation. Because of that challenge, CVSA filed a petition with FMCSA in October seeking clarity on the issue.

Keppler also said CVSA’s fatigue out-of-service guidance has been “subjective” and can be difficult for inspectors to enforce.

“So we modified the language in the out-of-service criteria to mirror the actual [FMCSA] regulation,” he said. “If it’s a regulatory violation, it’s an out-of-service condition.”

CVSA has petitioned the agency for a clarification of the fatigue regulation, Keppler said.

To illustrate the subjective nature of the fatigue regulation, in 2013, inspectors placed 1,276 drivers out of service for fatigue, he said. That same year, there were 3.5 million roadside driver inspections.

“If you take FMCSA’s hours-of-service rulemaking, they use a cost-benefit analysis that projected 13% of drivers were driving fatigued at any point in time,” Keppler said.

“Thirteen percent of 3.5 million is close to 450,000 drivers. So if we had a good regulation that was clear and able to be effectively enforced, that number of out-of-service drivers should have gone from 1,200 to 450,000.”