From the 2018 CSA’s Data Trail series examining enforcement patterns state to state, this graph shows states where brakes and/or tires make up the biggest percentages among each state’s total violations.With the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s annual Brake Safety Week focused inspection event happening across the nation next week, I thought I’d reshare the graph above, part of our 2018 series look at state-by-state enforcement patterns when it comes to maintenance. It accompanied a statistical profile of the state of Tennessee, which as you can see is among five states whose inspections result in the largest shares of brake-and tire-related violations, netting them these top 10 placement.
As I noted in that analysis last year, Tennessee’s high placement on these lists for states focused on clearly safety-sensitive tire and brake issues also happened to bring with it a dead-last (No. 48) rank for its low percentage of violations for light-related infractions.
There’s a good side to that, suggested Capt. Brandon Douglas at the time. Tires and brakes, safety- sensitive items, are “what we should be focused on, making sure trucks are traveling down the road safely.”
Among the relatively few light-related infractions written in Tennessee, about two-thirds were for the catchall Code of Federal Regulations 393.9(a), which states that all required lamps should be operable. That’s also generally the most common light violation in most states. More than half of the remainder of Tennessee light violations were written for brake lamps being inoperable. Nationally, that particular violation nets just a single percentage of the total violations, less than the share it accounts for in Tennessee. Given its relation to the braking system, though, you might add a single percentage to each of the following snapshot of 2015-’17 national percentages of brake violations among all viols in each of the three years.
Keeping up with your braking systems, in short, might be the most important thing you can do when it comes to avoiding the principal violations inspectors are looking for, particularly in the states shown at the top. That, of course, is a more than once-week-a-year thing, no doubt. Plenty of resources are out there, from a good mechanic to your fellow maintenance-minded haulers. You can find a round-up of a variety of past brake-maintenance-related resources on Overdrive here, too, via the “Staying ahead of the inspectors” post, updated routinely:
A few recent brake-related stories you can find below, too:
