The Department of Transportation has awarded a contract to use predictive tech to help crack down on fraud and cabotage, and to finally issue preliminary safety ratings to the masses.
The contract, awarded in April, specifically mentions needing safety ratings for the "thousands of new and unrated entrants that dominate the spot market."
That's likely music to the ears of just about everyone in trucking.
Carrier and broker associations, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision shifting broker liability, have been crying out for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to issue safety ratings to the more than 90% that remain unrated.
[Related: Brokers want FMCSA to publish list of 'high risk' motor carriers]
Owner-ops have reported being locked out of freight from C.H. Robinson for lacking safety ratings, and brokers have complained of an "impossible" task of assessing carrier safety for movement of millions of loads each year.
The contract, with DOT's Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, seeks to close the gap.
The contract, awarded to freight data firm Bluewire, is "focused on tackling fraud and cabotage while advancing a broader, data-driven framework to better understand -- and ultimately rate -- every motor carrier operating under DOT authority," Bluewire CEO Steve Bryan wrote on LinkedIn. "No more unrated carriers."
[Related: Will FMCSA safety ratings be key to owner-ops' access to freight?]
Bryan told Overdrive that DOT initially reached out about its efforts to tackle the problem of "cabotage," the illegal practice of Mexican- and Canadian-domiciled carriers hauling point-to-point within the U.S.
"We were given access to data that was not public and came from other law enforcement efforts," said Bryan. Using that, his firm mapped out where cabotage takes place and came up with a list of some 2,000 Mexican-based carriers spotted hauling in the U.S.
"We found all the [motor carrier] authorities and then just watched where they were being inspected," said Bryan. "We found that over 2,000 [Mexican carriers] blow through the borders, sometimes all the way up to the Great Lakes, and all the data was turned over to FMCSA to go and do their enforcement."
Around the same time, Bryan turned in that work to the DOT, thousands of Mexican driver visas were revoked through a partnership with Customs and Border Protection and DOT.
Bluewire's contract awarded in April called for creating a "predictive actuarial model that assigns an Interim Risk Rating to unrated Mexican-domiciled carriers with authorities to operate along the US-Mexico commercial border zone or to conduct long-haul international transport."
But following the contract's success, DOT approached him to continue that work for U.S.-based carriers, he said.
Bluewire is engaged with DOT to create a "statistically defensible model to ... replace today’s safety ratings," Bryan said.
Bryan said Bluewire will deliver the model to DOT at the end of September, but that won't result in safety ratings for all on October 1.
"Even if we invent something that is utter perfection, DOT will have to take that to Congress and the rulemaking process," said Bryan. "It's a long road, and that’s assuming our customer accepts what we give them."
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