Inspectors Want Trucking Office
The state-level officers spoke out through the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which has been their voice — and their workshop — for two decades.
And now that DOT’s own inspector general says it’s time for a distinct, unified motor carrier safety administration, CVSA has reason to feel vindicated.
As Congress works through an extraordinary string of hearings on trucking safety, CVSA appears ready to be more vocal about enforcement policy than ever before.
This is not exactly a new role for the organization — which, strictly speaking, does not belong to the enforcement community alone. The officers come from departments or ministries of transportation, public utilities commissions, highway patrols and police forces at all levels in the three nations of North America.
At the same time, trucking companies and their representatives, including American Trucking Associations, participate intimately in what CVSA does. It’s an ideal venue for all voices to be heard, Campbell believes.
It’s just that the alliance has not usually spoken loudly in public. It is accustomed to working as a series of committees, and in the give and take of negotiating, to come up with a regulatory consensus that just about everyone can work with — a far different approach than regulation by bureaucratic fiat.
In that role, CVSA has achieved some significant goals since its inception in the early 1980s, most notably uniformity in roadside inspections, which — at roughly 2 million stops a year — have become the mainstay of enforcement. The “partnership” got its biggest shot in the arm with the 1984 creation of the Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program, which funnels close to $100 million a year to state agencies in the United States, so they can hire, train and field several hundred trucking safety officers.
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