FMCSA Official Says Truckers Will Be Hit for Detectable Chassis Safety Violations

SAN ANTONIO — An official with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said the agency will begin soon to count some chassis safety violations against truckers, the next step toward full implementation of federal chassis safety rules.

“Carriers will be held accountable for violations that they should have seen on pre-trip [inspections],” which are done each time a trucker picks a chassis, said Jack Van Steenburg, FMCSA’s assistant administrator and chief safety officer. He spoke at the Transportation Intermediaries Association meeting here on March 22.

The agency will begin to enforce those violations against truckers in July, he said. Up to now, a total of 22,000 violations would have counted against drivers who should have detected them during pre-trip inspections, FMCSA said in a Federal Register notice dated March 26.

“Since the intermodal rule kicked in, we have not had [those] violations assigned,” Van Steenburg said, in a reference to the agency’s Safety Measurement System, or SMS, which tracks violations detected during inspections as part of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.

He explained that the agency has been evaluating whether those violations should be assigned to the trucker or the company that provided the equipment, since the CSA program began more than 15 months ago.

The chassis issue dates back to 2005, when a federal law established that chassis providers must be responsible for safe equipment and that their safety violations shouldn’t count against truck drivers.

Not until 2008 did FMCSA write a final rule governing chassis safety, and two more years of talks about implementation followed, even before CSA began in late 2010.

“There has been a very good effort to get the affected parties to move forward over time,” said Curtis Whalen, executive director of American Trucking Associations’ Intermodal Motor Carriers Conference, praising efforts to establish whether a defect such as brake adjustments should be counted against truck drivers or chassis providers.

However, Whalen said, “we still have a major, different point of view” about defects that are found during inspections, such as a taillight that burns out on the road as a result of faulty maintenance.

“That isn’t the driver’s fault,” he said.

“While the law was passed in 2005,” Whalen added, “we are still a long way from completion. Our position is to never go live until you get [the violations] right.”

Van Steenburg stressed the importance of the pre-trip inspection, saying, “If [truck drivers] find something wrong in the pre-trip, then the equipment provider has to give him a new one, or fix it.”

He also said that providers are making better equipment available.

“Out-of-service violations against intermodal vehicles [chassis] have come way down,” Van Steenburg said, without providing additional details. “We are starting to see better equipment out there.”

FMCSA’s notice also stressed efforts to fairly assign defects from a list of nearly 90 violations.

“FMCSA worked collaboratively with law enforcement officials and industry personnel, both on the motor carrier and intermodal equipment provider sides, to identify violations that could reasonably be found during a pre-trip inspection,” the agency’s notice said.

Whalen said that some drayage truckers still are suffering from having what he called “inflated” CSA scores that hurt their businesses because the data on the agency’s website are difficult to correct if violations were assigned improperly by inspectors.

“I have had members calling me and saying they lost business” because of CSA scores, Whalen said.