The Truck Renting and Leasing Association has asked federal regulators to postpone the elimination of “registrant-only” Department of Transportation numbers that are given to the owners of commercial vehicles who are not motor carriers.
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration officials said they want to eliminate issuing the special DOT numbers effective Aug. 31 because they are having an adverse affect on FMCSA’s ability to track motor carrier safety violations.
The misidentification problem occurs most frequently with companies who lease or rent trucks for 30 days or less. In that case, the rental company’s DOT number remains on the truck, and not the DOT number of the motor carrier renting the truck, said Thomas James, TRALA’s president.
Many of the problems are with unsafe operators or “reincarnated” carriers,” James said.
“In too many cases, law enforcement personnel were being presented with registrant-only USDOT numbers during inspections and crash investigations,” FMCSA said in a Federal Register posting last year.
“As a result, the data that should have been assigned to the record of the offending motor carrier operating the CMV was being erroneously assigned to the registrant-only USDOT number — a number that should have no safety events assigned to it.
But TRALA officials, who met with FMCSA on July 28, are not convinced that elimination of registrant-only DOT numbers would not solve the problem of misidentification of rental trucks.
“We had a very positive meeting with FMCSA,” James told Transport Topics. “They agreed that once they announced this more and more problems started to come to the surface.”
