Transportation Bill Loaded with Safety Initiatives, FMCSA Says

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The highway bill passed earlier this summer directs the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to complete 29 new rulemakings over the next 27 months, including a requirement for a final electronic logging device rule by October of 2013, agency officials said Monday.

In a briefing before the agency’s Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee, John Drake, FMCSA’s director of governmental affairs, said federal regulators will be busy the next few years not only meeting mandates for new regulations, but also responding to congressional requirements to implement 34 programmatic changes and complete 15 reports.

Between now and early 2013 alone, FMCSA plans to issue a remedial electronic logging device supplemental proposed rule, a proposed safety fitness determination rule, a final unified registration system rule, a drug and alcohol clearing hours proposed rule, and a “patterns of safety violations” proposed rule that will focus on truck and bus executives who turn a blind eye to unsafe business practices.

View the original article here

FMCSA announces final changes to CSA program

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has announced several changes to its Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) enforcement program, which are designed more quickly identify and address high-risk truck and bus companies with compliance concerns.

"Good data plays a key role in keeping our nation's roads safe," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. "These improvements will enable us to better identify and address unsafe truck and bus companies before tragedies occur."

Officials say the final CSA changes will provide FMCSA with more precise information when assessing a company’s over-the-road safety performance. The changes will be implemented in December and include:

• Changing the Cargo-Related BASIC (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category) to the Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance BASIC to better identify HM safety and compliance problems. FMCSA says its analysis shows that this change will identify more carriers with HM concerns (33.8% versus 29.1%).

• Changing the Fatigued Driving BASIC to the more specific Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance BASIC to more accurately reflect violations in this area; and weighting HoS paper and electronic logbook violations equally.

• Strengthening the Vehicle Maintenance BASIC by including cargo/load securement violations from today's Cargo-Related BASIC.

• Including intermodal equipment violations that should be found during drivers’ pre-trip inspections.

• Removing 1 to 5 mph speeding violations to ensure citations are consistent with current speedometer regulations.

• Ensuring all recorded violations accurately reflect the inspection type (i.e., only driver violations will be recorded under driver inspections).

"CSA is raising the bar for truck and bus safety. Our preliminary data shows that fatalities involving commercial vehicles dropped 4.7% last year compared to 2010," said FMCSA Administrator Ferro. "Still, on average, nearly 4,000 people die in large truck and bus crashes each year. That is why we are implementing these important changes to make CSA even more effective."

The American Trucking Associations praised the FMCSA’s changes, saying, “It is refreshing when a regulatory agency listens to the concerns of those most impacted by their actions, so we should take time to praise FMCSA for taking steps to address issues ATA has raised,” said ATA president and CEO Bill Graves. “In looking more closely at violation severity weights, for instance, FMCSA is taking some steps to make sure CSA achieves its stated goal of targeting carriers with increased crash risk.”

However, ATA urged the agency to continue to address serious shortcomings in the program and make badly needed improvements.

“These changes, while appreciated, point to the issue ATA has been urging FMCSA to address for some time: CSA scores are not necessarily indicative of elevated crash risk,” Graves said. “Several studies have told us this, and FMCSA’s changes indicate they believe it as well.

“ATA supports CSA’s original goal of reducing crashes by targeting unsafe carriers, but too often, the system highlights violations that bear little direct – or even indirect – relationship to crash risk. FMCSA must continue to hold true to CSA’s original goal and make changes to the program as necessary to do so.”

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) said the FMCSA’s announced changes “shows that the agency is listening to what truckers have been saying…(h)owever, impatience from truckers should not be unexpected when a program has real-life consequences on professionals that know of no other way to do business but safely.”  

 OOIDA officials also pointed out that there is an inherent lack of fairness or accuracy in the system, and that the FMCSA has failed to account for whether a truck driver is actually at fault for the accidents reported.

 “The onus is on FMCSA to show their program actually can identify carriers that really are likely to be involved in at-fault crashes as opposed to just running up numbers on the ‘alphabet soup’ of regulations they have on their books. The system operates from the premise that every trucker is the bad guy and this is a flawed approach for creating legitimate safety statistics or improving safety,” said Todd Spencer, executive vice-president of OOIDA.

“We are still reviewing the new changes and believe revising certain severity weightings are a step in the right direction, but we believe that FMCSA is still glossing over the lack of attribution of fault into the system.” 

“FMCSA is boasting that millions of people are now checking the CSA Web site. It is clear the impact that this program is having on the trucking and shipping industry, and ultimately on people’s livelihoods. Therefore, it is imperative that FMCSA fix the flaws,” said Spencer.

View the original article here

FMCSA Extends Comment Deadline for Oilfield Rule

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has pushed back the deadline for public comment about changes to the hours-of-service rules for oilfield haulers.

The deadline was extended to Oct. 5 from Aug. 6 and the agency will hold three public listening sessions to receive comments on the issue.

The sessions will be held in Denver on Aug. 17 and Pittsburgh on Aug. 21. The third session will be in Dallas on a yet to be determined date in September.

The proposed changes to the rules would include restricting the number of oil and gas drivers allowed to extend their workdays beyond the 14-hour limit.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has said that the new provision allows drivers who are waiting at oil or gas well sites to count that time as off-duty, but that the exemption applies only for trucks that are “specially constructed for use at oil and gas sites” and whose operators require “extensive” training for the use of the equipment

View the original article here

Maryland Trucking Company Shut Down by FMCSA for HOS, Safety Violations

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has declared Maryland-based Gunthers Transport an “imminent hazard to public safety” and ordered the carrier to cease operations.

FMCSA found multiple hours-of-service and vehicle maintenance violations following an “exhaustive review” of the company’s operations, the agency said Wednesday.

“Commercial truck companies that recklessly disregard federal safety regulations will be shut down and removed from our roadways,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.

FMCSA said Gunthers allowed its drivers to falsify their hours-of-service records and exceed the 11-hour limit for daily driving. The company did not require its drivers to perform pre-trip vehicle safety inspections, the agency said.

The carrier also operated trucks “that were in such poor condition they were likely to break down” and posed a high crash risk based on its on-road performance record, FMCSA said.

The company was previously convicted of hours-of-service violations in 1995. Gunthers Transport, then known as Gunther’s Leasing Transport, and owner Mark Gunther were found guilty of pressuring drivers to falsify records in the first case where felony criminal statues were used to enforce trucking safety regulations.

View the original article here

FMCSA Postpones Issuing Final HOS Rule

Bruce Harmon/Trans Pixs

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it will not meet Friday’s court settlement deadline to issue its final hours-of-service rule.

FMCSA said it continues to “work toward publication” of the rule, but the agency did not say when it planned to complete its work.

The agency said Friday that plaintiffs in the HOS lawsuit — including the Teamsters union and the group Public Citizen — agreed to extend the deadline.

“FMCSA will continue to work toward publishing a final rule as quickly as possible,” an agency spokeswoman said Friday.

The parties to a settlement agreement, which include FMCSA and the plaintiffs, will file their next status report with the court by Nov. 28, the agency said. FMCSA is part of the Department of Transportation.

View the original article here

Strike Three! – FMCSA, You’re Outta There!

The primary mission of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is to reduce crashes, injuries and fatalities involving large trucks and buses.

The FMCSA was established as a separate administration within the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) on January 1, 2000, pursuant to the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999. FMCSA is headquartered in Washington, DC and employs more than 1,000 people in all 50 States and the District of Columbia, all dedicated to improving the safety of commercial motor vehicles (CMV) and saving lives.

These are the guys that are supposed to keep everyone in the trucking industry in order. But who can we get to keep them in order? 2011 has not been a good year for FMCSA this would be the third strike against this government agency – when will we stand up and demand they be investigated?

Back in January of this year the FMCSA received two strikes against them right off the bat. The American Trucking Association reported that the FMCSA liked to manipulate reports to make the reports in their favor so they would have “proof” of some regulation they wanted to add to the trucking industry.

in an effort to rationalize a change in federal Hours of Service (HOS) requirements for professional truck drivers, the U.S. DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) misapplied its own crash numbers so as to elevate driver fatigue as a cause of truck crashes, the American Trucking Associations (ATA)

We now have the FMCSA making things up just so they can add or take away from regulations as long as they get what they want. That doesn’t sound like a safety group to me, does it you? Although, this does not surprise me as we already knew they like to “mold” or “fudge” reports into their favor. When the real facts are supplied they ignore them because the real facts tell a very different story than the manipulated reports they use do.

Next up was a few days after the first report a second report from E-Trucker.com said that a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) field supervisor has pleaded not guilty to a bribery charge, despite recordings of him agreeing to delay a carrier review or audit for cash. What is the deal with these two accusations against these lawmakers?

Oh but wait it only gets better, you see now we have a third reason to call them corrupt. Charlie Morasch – a Land Line staff writer reported late yesterday that A Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration enforcement officer has been indicted for accepting bribes in exchange for Level 1 CVSA decals. The decals, issued by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, signal to other law enforcement officers that a commercial motor vehicle has passed a roadside inspection. Eric Hernandez, an FMCSA Motor Carrier Safety Specialist who worked at the agency’s Laredo, TX, office allegedly sold the stickers to truck drivers.

This is kind of scary news because the Obama administration is getting ready to re-open the failed cross-border trucking program – that ironically was closed before because of safety and security reasons. The leaders in the trucking industry should be demanding that an investigation be done on the FMCSA to see if they are still a felicitous part of the government – especially since they are the ones that decide what rules the trucking industry is to operate under.

This last incrimination against the FMCSA is something that needs to be investigated BEFORE the already failed cross-border trucking program with Mexico allows a bunch of “safe” trucks – that received their clear inspection stickers via cash donations – into the United States.

Maybe the “claims” that these government agencies use to “make things seem worse than they really are” are in fact – made up? It’s getting to the point that these morons need to stop playing games, and get serious. If this is true and is taking place – then an investigation needs to be done – and the trash needs taken out!

Sources:
FMCSA border inspector in TX indicted for taking bribes
Strike Two! – Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration
FMCSA – mission statement

© 2011, Truck Drivers News Blog. All rights reserved.

View the original article here