The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance's Operation Safe Driver Week started on Sunday with law enforcement focusing on dangerous behaviors, including speeding, distracted driving, following too closely, drunk or drugged driving, and reckless, careless or dangerous driving.
That focus remains unchanged from last year, but this year, President Donald Trump's executive order mandating English language proficiency for all commercial drivers and the following FMCSA guidance have added a new OOS violation to the mix.
CVSA's Director of Enforcement Programs Jake Elvorita told Overdrive that Operation Safe Driver Week mostly takes the form of a media outreach campaign to the driving public, specifically passenger drivers, which CVSA acknowledges cause most of the deadly crashes on highway.
"Operation Safe Driver Week is a combination of both an outreach program and an enforcement program, like what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does with 'Click It or Ticket,'" he said.
"Particularly post-COVID, people got used to" speeding along on empty highways and "getting aggressive with their behavior," while driving, said Elvorita. "More than 50% of crashes that occur with a large truck are a result of a passenger vehicle’s interaction" with the truck, he continued.
The outreach takes the form of posters, flyers, social media posts, a successful partnership with CBS and the Paramount+ streaming platform, as well as plenty of PSAs for commercial drivers and passenger drivers alike, but no real structured enforcement blitz like Roadcheck, said Elvorita.
"Certain jurisdictions might have some traffic officers or general patrol step up and participate" in looking for bad behavior on the road, but the scales won't all be open like they were in May, he said. There could, however, be "more inspectors and officers out in the roadways probably doing Level 3 traffic enforcement inspections or Level 2 if they see equipment-related stuff."
Otherwise, Overdrive asked Elvorita about the first few violations for 391.11(b)(2), the regulation mandating English language proficiency among commercial drivers, coming in after the guidance went live on June 25. So far, hundreds of such violations have been reported, though not on FMCSA's official site just yet, and not all have fallen under the "OOS" column -- some were simply violations.
Elvorita said "within the guidance that FMCSA put out in their memo, where [lacking ELP] isn’t an OOS violation is in the border zones," he said. Notably, Texas and Arizona so far seem to have the most ELP violations recorded, and both states have border zones where inspectors cannot mark drivers OOS for lacking ELP.
However, "outside the border zone," lacking English now must be "an OOS violation," he said.
Otherwise, Elvorita and CVSA hope Operation Safe Driver Week saves some lives this year. The most recent NHTSA preliminary data showed a 3% decrease in fatal truck-involved crashes, and he's hopeful to build on that success.
"Some people might say that 3% is not a lot," he said, "but that's 175 lives."
