Editorial: Superior Effort, Superior Results
Cheering squads, trophies and yellow ducks notwithstanding, there is a very serious aspect to the National Truck Driving Championships.
If you don’t believe us, ask the commercial vehicle inspectors through North America involved in this year’s Roadcheck safety event. They gave a passing grade to 95.4% of the drivers who they checked during three days in June (see story, p. 3). Only 4.6% were placed out of service, a rating very comparable to the 4.2% all-time low last year.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which announced the results last week, also said the out-of-service rate for trucks and buses undergoing demanding Level 1 inspections dipped to 22.4% from 22.8% last year.
The fact this encouraging report coincides with 425 drivers competing at NTDC in Minneapolis, along with 50 inspectors in the North American Inspectors Championship, is not a coincidence.
NTDC Grand Champion Don Logan usually drives a doubles rig for FedEx Freight. But in his sixth year of competing at the nationals, he drove a flatbed, won the division and then the whole event.
Robert Sutton of ABF Freight System, NTDC’s rookie of the year, is 49 years old and has accumulated 2 million accident-free miles — some rookie.
At the inspectors contest, Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Christopher Smithen tallied a remarkable hat trick by scoring the most points by an American, winning the grand championship and earning the John Youngblood Award of Excellence.
All of the men and women work hard, care deeply and perform solidly on a daily basis, whether in searing heat, bitter cold or driving rain. Those of us involved in any part of trucking know and respect this — and hope the public does, too.
“Both the enforcement community and the trucking industry should share in the credit for the continued positive trend in violation reduction and, more importantly, the historically low crash rates,” said Dave Osiecki, an American Trucking Associations senior vice president of the Roadcheck report.
As the driver and inspector competitors would be the first to say, this week’s news is not an end to the process but a mile marker along the trail.
There’s more work to be done by just about everyone in the industry. The more effort put forth in better engineering and effective training, the greater the likelihood of reducing accidents, injuries and fatalities.
CVSA Executive Director Stephen Keppler called the complete Roadcheck results “mixed,” with demonstrated improvement yet room for much more.
As we offer one last round of congratulations to everyone who competed in Minneapolis, we believe they are among those best to help meet the next challenges.
