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CAPITOL RECAP
A review of important news coming out of our nation’s capital.
By Lyndon Finney, Klint Lowry and Dorothy Cox
With ELDs done and dusted, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration says from their CMV inspections, the rate of
compliance was 99.14 percent, making it pretty much “universal.” Now it’s time to mine the ELD data to drive more change for the
better, from needed HOS flexibility to flagrant detention time scofflaws. It appears more changes are in the offing for CSA, as FMCSA
withdrew its latest changes so it can concentrate on an overhaul recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. And speaking of
overhauls, FMCSA and state agencies are working on getting their computer systems upgraded. Meanwhile, the trucking industry is
still battling tolls and freight is still booming. But will it continue to boom? That and more are explored in this latest Capitol Recap.
‘UNIVERSAL’ ELD COMPLIANCE
December 18, 2017, came and went; so did April 1, 2018 — the soft
and hard enforcement dates, respectively, for the ELD mandate — and the
world didn’t orbit off its axis or the U.S. fall into the sea.
By midyear, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration had
launched a new page on its website declaring that according to its nearly
600,000 inspections nationwide, there was a 99.14 percent compliance
rate for the devices, making conformity nearly “universal.”
The page’s main feature was a graph that shows the rate at which
drivers have been cited for Hours of Service violations during the past
year. It was color-coded to divide the year into three time periods: the
leadup to the ELD mandate, the period from the soft rollout to the full
rollout, and the two-plus months since the full rollout.
The graph tracked the rate of total driver inspections from month to
month along with the percentage of drivers each month who were cited
for at least one HOS violation.
FMCSA spokesman Duane DeBruyne explained the graph represented
violations of daily or weekly HOS time limits, such as the 14-hour daily
total service rule, and didn’t include those cited for not having a required
electronic recording device.
The chart indicated a significant downward improvement over the past
year in the number of HOS citations issued. The chart showed only 0.64
percent of inspections conducted in May 2018 led to HOS violations, a
rate that is less than half of the 1.31 percent it was in May 2017.
The most notable spot on the graph marked a sharp, sudden decline in
HOS violations immediately as the ELD mandate went into its soft rollout
phase in December, from 1.19 percent to 0.83 percent in that one-month
period. A second, slow but steady drop was also seen beginning in March,
shortly before full enforcement began, and continuing to the present.
While the graph appeared to imply a direct relationship between
implementation of the ELD mandate and improved HOS compliance,
CSA CHANGES WITHDRAWN
In an effort to make a substantive change to the CSA safety
evaluation program rather than a piecemeal fix, the Federal Motor
Carrier Safety Administration has withdrawn its most recent
proposed changes to CSA so it can concentrate on a more sweeping
overhaul suggested by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
A key recommendation of the NAS for an overhaul of CSA’s Safety
Measurement System (SMS) was that FMCSA build a new system of
data collection and analysis called the Item Response Theory or IRT,
which is said to be more about probabilities than tallying violations.
there was nothing to indicate whether that’s yielded any measurable safety
benefits yet, which the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association
immediately pounced on.
OOIDA also cited the various exemptions applied for by groups and
carriers, saying it was proof the mandate needs to be reworked.
David Heller, vice president of government affairs for the Truckload
Carriers Association, questioned just how extensive the list of exemptions
is becoming and added that the statistics from FMCSA represent a positive
step that is part of a process.
The near-universal use of electronic logging provides the industry with
an opportunity, Heller explained. While ELDs are monitoring drivers’
compliance with HOS rules, they are compiling an enormous amount of
data. “It’s telling the story of drivers’ lives that we’ve anecdotally been
telling for years, but now we have the data that supports it,” he said.
In background information accompanying its withdrawal
announcement FMCSA noted that “the NAS cautioned the agency
against making changes to the algorithm based on ad-hoc analysis and
instead to rely on the IRT.”
The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation or FAST Act required
NAS to conduct a study of CSA and SMS, the agency’s current
algorithm for identifying patterns of non-compliance and prioritizing
carriers for intervention.
In a report to Congress on its findings, NAS gave benchmarks for
12 TRUCKLOAD AUTHORITY | www.Truckload.org TCA 2018