While close to 90 percent of accidents are directly linked to errors in driver behavior, today only 10 percent of safety-intervention activities — from traffic stops to inspections and carrier investigations — are actually focused on behavior.

“Real safety is taking a backseat to clerical errors on logbooks,” wrote William McKelvie, commenting under this story about the subject on OverdriveOnline.com. “Maybe we should give [Anne Ferro] points every time she or someone in [FMCSA] offices makes a clerical mistake, then fire them when it gets to a certain point level? Grand idea!”

Fat chance, noted another commenter, who offered the viewpoint that “most roadside inspectors don’t know their job — they think they are tax collectors instead of safety inspectors.”

“So true,” noted Michael Bechara. “It’s not about safety, it’s about the bank!”

Andrea Sitler agreed, too, and suggested the FMCSA and state partners work on a safety-enhancement program designed to be based on rewarding carriers for safety, rather than penalizing them with points that correspond all too often to non-safety-related violations. “If you want real safety,” she said, “work with the companies to improve their vehicles and driver habits. Use a reward system instead of a punitive one. Positive reinforcement has been proven to provide much greater results than negative punishment.”

Ray McKenzie, commenting on Overdrive‘s Facebook page, emphasized, too, the low-hanging highway-safety fruit that he saw as stronger enforcement of “the laws that are in place for four-wheelers and how they conduct themselves around trucks. The list is far too long to mention, but in most cases it has been the experience of the truck driver that has saved an accident from happening.”

To really improve safety, Byrd said, “We must be guided by what the data tells us,” namely that “87 percent of the crashes are the result of driver error or driver behavior.” Only 10 percent of crashes, he said, can be attributed to vehicle malfunction, 3 percent to environmental factors. “Examining driver credentials is not he best way of enforcing driver behavior,” he added, calling on a shift in focus away from roadside inspections at the state level to “on-road enforcement of traffic laws.

Pointing to a slide display showing several of his Bulldog Hiway Express fleet trucks, “This represents trucks you don’t need to stop,” said Phil Byrd, getting a laugh from the assembled enforcement-community representatives at the CVSA Workshop in Louisville, Ky.

“Coupled with some inspection activities, [such robust enforcement] is four times more effective than roadside inspections – it makes sense for us to place far more emphasis of traffic enforcement.”

Byrd presented FMCSA’s own data to show the decline in traffic enforcement actions and the rise in inspection activity over many years. “There will be some of those who say a shift will cause equipment condition to slip,” he said, “but to those I say that focusing on traffic enforcement is an appropriate direction of our resources toward improving driver behavior.”

FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro, however, appeared unfazed in her talk, which directly followed Byrd’s. In some sense, she said, she agreed with Byrd that a combination of robust traffic enforcement and inspections as necessary for public highway safety. Referencing 2011 fatal crash data Overdrive reported on showing a 20 percent increase “in the  number of deaths of occupants of trucks,” she said, “one third [of the dead drivers] weren’t wearing seatbelts, and more than one in four were speeding. Speeding, seat belts, fatigue, all of these continue to be big actors in crashes…. High-visibility enforcement is a critical component of influencing behavior. High-visibility enforcement and taking conviction action is important to everything we do.”

“We are determined to get those bad actors off the road and out of the business. Gone are the days when folks could reincarnate, stick a few new DOT numbers in their pocket” and keep on running. —FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro on ramped-up investigatory action at FMCSA in recent times, particularly on the bus side of the carrier population.

But so are roadside inspections, she added. Even the Driver Fitness Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Category under the Compliance, Safety, Accountability regime, which has been shown not to correlate to carrier crash rates, can be utilized toward identifying unsafe carriers, Ferro said. “Three out of four [companies at alert status in that BASIC] also have an alert in another area. Compliance and accountability lead to safety, over and over again.”

Byrd also called on boosting education of and enforcement against the primary at-fault party in 70 percent of all truck-involved accidents. “Consider that 31 percent of traffic fatalities result from a driver impaired by alcohol,” Byrd said. “However, in only 2 percent of fatal truck crashes was the truck driver alcohol-impaired. Also, we know that younger drivers and older drivers have higher fatal crash rates than middle-agers. But they don’t drive trucks”as a general rule.

“Recognizing these statistics,” he added, “we must admit that focusing almost exclusively on the condition of trucks and the behavior of the truck driver will” be a mere drop in the safety bucket. “We must focus on the behavior of cars around trucks.”

EOBR update
Ferro updated CVSA attendees on the status of the electronic-log mandate Supplemental Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the next step in FMCSA’s advancement of the mandate, codified into law with the MAP-21 highway bill last year.  The SNPRM could be expected in September, she said, and the ultimate rule would do four things:

1. Requires elogs for all truck and bus carriers using paper logs today
2. Include provisions that prohibit the devices’ use for harassment
3. Specify device technical standards
4. Specify the required level of supporting document retention, which would be considerably lessened compared to the paper environment.

Medical certifications and the CDL
Ferro also detailed the three components of the agency’s ongoing “driver qualification loophole shutdown initiative,” as she dubbed agency efforts to crack down on fraudulent medical certifications.  

1. The concept of linking the medical certification to the Commercial Drivers License. “That’s in place today,” she said. “Most states have expanded their CDL/med cert efforts, but there are some states that haven’t gone far enough in enforcing that link between the CDL and the med cert.”
2. The National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners. The requirement for any DOT physical to performed by an examiner who has undergone certification and is in the registry is coming in May 2014.
3. Requirement for examiners to electronically trasmit medical certification information through FMCSA to the state of record when physicals are performed.

The public relations blame-game back-and-forth between the American Trucking Associations and advocacy groups like Parent Against Tired Truckers and Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways saw a particularly pathetic entry in February, as Overdrive Editorial Director Max Heine wrote on Overdrive Extra. The Truck Safety Coalition, a partnership of PATT and CRASH, tried to put a shell over an ATA report that analyzed studies conducted over a decade to conclude that in car-truck crashes on the nation’s highways the four-wheeler was at fault in nearly 80 percent of cases.

The coalition’s open letter to the ATA disputed the very existence of reliable data on the issue and attempted to frame the discussion around the disproportionate number of automobile drivers and passengers who die as a result of car-truck collisions, along the way suggesting that fault is seldom able to be determined in crashes. “To insist that fault cannot be determined in some accidents is to ignore the fact that it is easily determined in most,” wrote Daniel McCreary, commenting on the issue at Overdrive’s Facebook page. “I was involved in one of those collisions…. I was hit four feet on my side of the line by a four-wheeler.”

McCreary joined others in questioning the agenda of groups like the TSC: “It seems as if they’re more interested in simply sticking it to truckers rather than working to help make the roads safer.”

M. Rick Richards referred to TSC, CRASH, and PATT as mere “shills of the railroads, created to attack the trucking industry any chance they get.”

Commenting under the story at OverdriveOnline.com, Scott Lawrence told the tale of a recent accident he was involved in where he was rear-ended at 1 a.m. in the morning in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. “There was absolutely nobody on the road but the two of us,” he said of himself and the couple in the car that hit him. The driver was moving too fast and “fooling around with a cell phone or something,” Lawrence said, and while he “blames split speed limits” the “bottom line is this: the Idaho Trooper drove out the accident scene three times” and was in fact able to determine fault. “The four-wheeler was at fault and ticketed.”

Lawrence “felt bad for the driver and his girlfriend” (both were unhurt), “but I was doing what I should have been doing, and they were not.

“When you get right down to it, people like to blame the truck drivers because of the ‘deep-pocket’ insurance payouts. We are at fault because trucking companies would rather pay out on a claim than challenge it” in many cases.

Gordon Alkire urged fellow owner-operators to follow his lead to “fix this folly” and “install dash cameras to verify the actions of the four-wheelers. I have one looking forward out the dash, and boy does it capture some dumb moves by car drivers.”

Send videos of such action, Alkire suggested, to the authorities and so-called “experts who are against trucks. The blame does not fall on us as a majority. Yes, there are some truck drivers that should not be behind the wheel but in numbers nowhere close to drivers of four-wheelers that should not be driving.”

And, Alkire added, “PATT and CRASH need to clean their own house first…. It is people like them who are causing accidents. It is due to them not being educated on how to behave around trucks on our highways that causes a majority of these accidents.”

Owen, who opposes the mandate, wrote Transport Topics responding to a December Graves editorial that, among other things, claimed a broad consensus behind the EOBR mandate. Graves further urged the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration get working to codify the mandate as a rule already. Owen found it “interesting” that Graves never used the phrase “electronic onboard recorders” in the editorial, “only electronic logging. Has he softened somewhat on mandated EOBRs?” Owen wrote. “We know that the Truckload Carriers Association was initially opposed to mandated EOBRs” with functions beyond logging “but changed its position to favor electronic logging devices. Is this just semantics, or is there a perceived difference between” the two.

Graves’ answer noted that EOBR in his mind and those of many others refers to a device with robust fleet-management capabilities as well as the hours-of-service recording capability. And — new industry-standard-acronym alert! — ELDs are just log-capable devices, or what he says Congress thought it was mandating in the highway bill last year and what both TCA and ATA support to be mandated.

But what I want to know is, as a term for public consumption, does an ELD somehow smell sweeter than an EOBR? To my mind the EOBR shorthand works well enough to describe any electronic logging device, given its long use and familiarity. While ELD offers a bit of an advantage in that you can pronounce it (rhymes with “weld”), I’ve mostly refrained from using “electronic logging device” in part due to an ingrained editor’s distaste for redundancy — why not just call it an “electronic log” (EL, anyone?), as by its very nature it’s a device. In any case, I think I’ll just stick with the tried-and-true terminology if that’s all right with you.

Accurately… and automatically
Graves also argued semantics with NASTC President Owen over Owen’s argument that, as we’ve noted on the blog here in the past, [ELDs, ELs or EOBRs, take your pick] may not even be able to do what the highway bill wants them to — in Owen’s words, “ensure driver compliance with the hours-of-service rules.”

Graves noted the statute only speaks of devices that “will improve compliance (but not ensure it) and can be used to accurately record drivers’ hours of service.”

Note he left out the “automatic” part of the highway-bill language defining “electronic logging device.” Perhaps that’s further evidence of OOIDA’s Norita Taylor’s cynicism over the term’s contemporary usage, if you’re feeling particularly cynical yourself, given the nature of so many “automatic” things in our lives. Or: If you’re more a low-level cynic, maybe the EOBR mandate does in fact have a problem, as Owen too suggests.

What do you think? Are ankle bracelets with auto and hyper-fine GPS capability or some kind of full-body motion sensor to monitor on-duty not-driving, off-duty, sleeper and other non-driving time going to necessarily be required to satisfy the “automatic” part of the statute?

Yeah, maybe it’s well best to do as Graves did and ignore that part of it….

The group was selected from 32 finalists, a pared down number from the original 2,000 applications.

For the list of drivers, see Overdrive sister site CCJ‘s report.

“I was a trucker for 41 years, 33 of them as an owner-operator and leased to a carrier. I know that through all those years I did not collect enough in detention time. Altogether, it would not even have bought a good flat-screen TV.”

Another commenter, posting only as “Cor,” expressed frustration with detention at chemical plants and other facilities during years running dry bulk freight, utilizing an air compressor to offload. “I have always liked my job — otherwise I would have never started it — but being kept like the moron of the year in some factory because the customer has other priorities is another story.” Cor cited an average 25 hours a month lost to extended waits at customer facilities. “The trucking company is afraid to complain because it may lose a customer, but in the end the driver, owner-operator or company driver, pays the bill.”

Andrea Sitler, manager of a local drayage hauler, in her comments noted that more carriers needed to take responsibility for compensating their drivers and leased owner-operators, whether or not the carrier actually billed shippers for detention directly or got better rates to account for detention-pay outlays to drivers. “Unfortunately, that is not how it works but how it should work,” she wrote. “I believe the trucking company, not the shipper/receiver, should set the detention policy for its drivers. The company needs to pay the driver for his/her time. If the company negotiates another deal with the shipper or receiver that is on the company — not the driver.”

Sitler went on to add, “The industry needs to take a collective stand on this issue. It is a major one that affects the bottom line of the company as well as the owner-operator and driver. Time is money, and never has that been more true since the hours of service change limiting the overall workday. Just as an hourly worker is compensated for his/her time, so should a driver be compensated. The driver did not choose to go sit in the parking lot and wait. Dispatch sent him/her there due to an agreement with the shipper/receiver on time.”

The excessive uncompensated detention issue ranked No. 3 in our polling of readers earlier in the year on the top problems for owner-operators in today’s industry, behind only fuel prices and regulatory issues around hours and electronic logs. Find more coverage of the detention issue in this follow-up.

Fleet executives don’t seem to view the issue as of paramount importance, however. Detention didn’t rank in the top 10 of industry concerns released early in October by the American Trucking Associations’ research arm, the American Transportation Research Institute.

Noted owner-operator Gordon Alkire, “It is not the shipper that is the problem most times. It is the carrier that thinks to demand detention for their drivers will cost them the customer. In some cases, it may happen. But shippers will pay if several things are in their favor: dependability of carrier, the rate that the carrier charges them, service of the carrier, attitude of drivers at the customer facility, equipment availability. It takes all this and more to command the constant partnership of customers. Some shippers look at only the rate per mile for that day and seldom at the long-term savings of a good carrier. Unless you’re a company driver you have a choice whether or not to haul for that customer. If you have your own authority you set the rates and conditions.”

For this and other reasons, Lippard wrote, he doesn’t much miss his trucking career. “I have been out of trucking for over a year now — I still have nightmares over waiting to get loaded and the way I was treated by shippers and recievers. I call it PTSD from trucking. Just like being in a war — no one can understand it until they have gone through it. Truckers should be paid strictly by the hour for all hours they are in that truck. Then trucking companies and all of them would start screaming at those shippers to get the trucks loaded or else it will cost them.”

Tell us what you think in the comments.

Haul the Vote has a good roundup of trucking issues, including owner-operator topics, hours of service, diesel prices, tolls and highway privatization. It doesn’t tell you where President Obama and Mitt Romeny appear to stand on them, but a separate section does make a brief stab at trucking-related aspects of their records.

You’ll also see the candidates’ stances on other matters of importance to you, such as taxes and health.

“Probably runaways,” he said sadly, more to himself than to me. I recall seeing at least five or six of them. “How did they manage find each other and form some sort of bond,” I wondered. Still, I assumed they had chosen the situation they were in.

I hadn’t give those girls much thought in the past two-plus decades that have passed until 2011 when I attended a Truckers Against Trafficking press conference at The Great American Trucking Show in Dallas. I watched the premiere of a documentary about children being forced in the sex trade business. And it was an interview with FBI Supervisory Special Agent Evan Nicolas of the Crimes Against Children unit, that made me remember those young girls at that truck stop long ago. Nicolas said it’s a mistake to think that most young children working as prostitutes are doing it willingly. “I don’t think anyone wants to be beaten and raped on a daily basis or beaten in the most extreme ways …” he said. “I don’t think there is any willingness, especially of your child victims.”

Two shocking statistics to consider: The average age for human trafficking victims is 12 years old. The life expectancy of a child after being forced into prostitution is less than 10 years.

Sadly, I was young and ignorant about the ugly sex trade and child trafficking underworld back then. I only wondered to myself and went about my business. Please, educate yourself about child trafficking. The Truckers Against Trafficking website  has a wealth of information including videos and even an app.

American Trucking Associations join forces with Truckers Against Trafficking

But above all, if you see a child, teenager or even younger, in a truck stop parking lot, rest area or wherever and things don’t look right, make a call to either the local police or the Truckers Against Trafficking national hotline – 888-373-7888. Few phone calls in your life, could make more of a difference that this one.

Carriers, truck rental companies and truck and trailer manufacturers have provided $380,035 to the former Massachusetts governor. Separate from that, American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves gave $587,500 to Romney’s campaign as a bundler or a conduit, an individual or group that collects and delivers contributions to a candidate.

President Barack Obama has received $32,277 from trucking-related groups.

The industry traditionally has backed mostly Republican candidates in federal races and currently has 86 percent of its financial support behind GOP candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The non-partisan, non-profit research group tracks political contributions and provided the data.

The presidential candidate with the second highest overall trucking donations is longtime Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who received $72,250 before dropping out of the Republican primary.

Trucking also donated $49,322 to twelve-term Texas congressman Ron Paul, who left the GOP presidential race last month.

Tying for third place in industry donations are two non-presidential GOP candidates who each received $60,500. Six-term congressman Jeff Flake and former Virginia governor George Allen are vying for Senate seats in their respective states.

Federal candidates received a total of nearly $6.3 million trucking sector dollars, with about $4.7 million of that from individual donors and almost $1.6 million from Political Action Committees. The remaining $11,000 is soft or outside money to political parties and outside spending groups.

The CRP ranks the American Trucking Associations as a “Heavy Hitter,” which means it is one of the 140 biggest overall donors to federal elections since the 1990 election cycle. This election cycle, it contributed a total of $562,400 to candidates and the remaining $106,150 to political parties and outside spending groups.

In congressional races, three Republican members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee were the top recipients of ATA funds.

Iowa Rep. Tom Latham, an appropriations transportation subcommittee member in his ninth congressional term, received the most ATA contributions with $12,750. Florida Rep. John Mica, chairman of the transportation committee chairman and Pennsylvania Rep. Bill Shuster, chairman of the Railroads Pipelines and Hazardous Materials subcommittee, each received $10,000 from the organization.

The Owner-Operator Independent Driver Association contributed $293,738 this election cycle. Candidates received $275,738 of that while the remainder went to PACs, parties and outside spending groups.

OOIDA’s highest contribution to a candidate was $10,000 to West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall, now in his 18th term and a ranking member of the House transportation committee.

ATA says it, along with its state affiliates and American’s Road Team Captains, will celebrate by holding events around the country.

“Professional truck drivers deliver our nation’s essential freight safely, every day,” said ATA President and CEO Bill Graves.  “As a result of this commitment, our nation’s highways are the safest they have ever been and our grocery shelves are stocked. We as a nation, owe a great deal to the truck drivers out on our nation’s roads, as well as the families of those behind the wheel.”

The celebrations this week will be hosted by motor carriers, shippers and others with million-mile and safety awards, cash bonuses or gifts, an extra paid day off, a cup of coffee or windshield cleaning at truck stops, goodie bags with fresh fruit and water, free health checks and numerous celebration meals. Several events will last all week, until every driver cycles through company headquarters. Office personnel at some companies are also encouraged to spend a few days out on the road to see the driver’s side of their business.  Many celebrations will be kicked off with a video tribute to the professional truck driver.

ATA is once again hosting a video contest focusing on the professional truck driver.  To view some of the industry submissions, click here.

Dates for upcoming National Truck Driver Appreciation Week celebrations will be September 15-21, 2013 and September 14-20, 2014.