CVSA Says Driver Compliance Matches ’09 Roadcheck Record

This story appears in the July 19 print edition of Transport Topics.

Of the drivers pulled over during last month’s Roadcheck 2010, only 4.4% were placed out of service, tying the driver compliance record set in 2009, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance reported.

CVSA also said 80% of the trucks inspected during the June 8-10 event did not receive any citations, down slightly from the 80.4% passage rate in 2009 that was the highest since 1996.

“I think if you look at the numbers, they stayed fairly consistent with last year, and last year we had record lows for out-of-service rates,” said Stephen Keppler, CVSA’s interim executive director. “I think that’s a good thing on behalf of the industry in terms of them doing their due diligence to ensure that their drivers and vehicles are as safe as they can be.”

During the 72-hour event throughout North America, federal, state and provincial commercial vehicle inspectors checked 65,327 trucks and buses at 2,482 different locations, a 10.2% decrease from 2009. Keppler said the overall number of inspections was lower because more were done off the main interstates.

The 95.6% driver compliance rate means that 62,453 of the more than 65,000 drivers stopped for inspections were deemed skilled and safe enough to be on the roads.

“This year’s Roadcheck results provide further evidence of the trucking industry’s steadfast commitment to safety,” said American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves.

“Roadcheck has once again successfully reinforced the critical importance of safety, compliance, and crash prevention — lives depend on both safe and well-maintained trucks and safe and well-trained drivers,” FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said in a statement.

CVSA said that 48,970 of the 65,000 inspections conducted during Roadcheck were Level 1 inspections.

Those checks are the most thorough, with inspectors poring over driver certification and load documents, and scrutinizing each piece of equipment on a truck.

Of the 48,970 trucks that underwent Level 1 inspections, 23.3% were put out of service. However, 26,605 of these inspections resulted in the issuance of special CVSA decals, meaning no violations were found.

In the hazardous materials truck category, the levels of both driver and vehicle compliance rose this year, with 97.5% of drivers passing, compared with 97% last year. In addition, 83.7% of hazmat vehicles passed inspection, up from 83% in 2009, the CVSA figures showed.

Overall, CVSA said inspectors found 189 more safety belt violations than they did last year — 1,159 for 2010 versus 970 for 2009.

Likewise, violations for falsified driver hours-of-service logs were up 18%, from 430 in 2009 to 508 in 2010.

CVSA speculated that compliance rates in these areas may be weaker because the pool of drivers pulled over was slightly different in Roadcheck 2010 than previous years.

Some states did more mobile, random roadside inspections than in the past, when they concentrated on interstate inspection checkpoints, officials said.

“We, the states, are being asked to look more at the rural roads because the data shows the fatalities are happening more [there] than on the interstates,” said CVSA President Buzzy France, the administrator for the Maryland State Police.

“If we’re going to cut down fatalities, if that’s where they’re occurring, we need to address those areas and I think that’s a lot of what we saw in Roadcheck this year,” France said.

Dave Osiecki, ATA’s senior vice president for policy and regulatory affairs, said the increase in HOS log violations could be because inspectors are doing a better job of checking logs.

Also, trucking executives, he said, are telling ATA that the recession has allowed them to retain their best drivers, which may be reflected in how well driver compliance rates held steady from 2009 to 2010.

On the equipment side, some of the most noticeable variations from last year’s inspection results occurred in the percentage of overall violations taken up by lights, tires and brakes.

Last year, for example, violations involving vehicle lights accounted for 11.6% of the total vehicle violations compared with 13.2% this year. Tire violations last year accounted for only 10.5% of overall violations compared with 11.2% this year.

Keppler said he did not know if the shifts signified that fleet owners were putting off simple maintenance in an effort to stretch their budgets during the recession.

Brake violations still accounted for more than half the vehicle violations this year, although as a percentage of all violations brakes have been dropping — to 50.8% this year compared with 51.6% in 2009 and 52.5% in 2008.

Such shifts, Keppler said, particularly in the brake safety category, may be occurring because CVSA recently has been stressing to fleets and to inspectors the importance of a particular vehicle category, such as brake adjustments.