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2007 SORROW TO STRENGTH PRESS CONFERENCE

Comments on the Report Card Grades of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA)

Making Safety the Top Priority as Directed by Congress - F

When Congress created the new, separate Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration near the end of 1999, it charged the agency with fulfilling its safety mission as its sole, highest priority. Instead, FMCSA has engaged in weak, ineffectual rulemaking, oversight, and enforcement policies and actions that have failed to reduce the dramatic overrepresentation of large trucks in fatal crashes, have failed to improve motorcoach safety, and have repeatedly placed safety in a scale that is balanced in favor of trucking industry productivity and economic health despite the fact that Congress did not give the agency a dual mandate for enhancing both safety and trucking productivity.

Achieving Promised Goals to Reduce Truck and Bus Deaths and Injuries - F

The most recent figures for large truck crash fatalities show that 5,212 people died in 2005, scarcely changed from the 5,380 people who died in 1999 when the former Secretary of the U.S. DOT, Rodney Slater, promised that the Department would achieve a reduction of deaths by 50 percent in 10 years, that is, by the close of 2008. Subsequently, DOT altered the goal to achieving a reduction in the rate of large truck fatalities to 1.65 deaths per 100 Million Truck Miles Traveled (100MTMT) by the close of 2008. However, the rate achieved over the last few years has been above 2.3 deaths per 100MTMT. Recently, DOT has again changed its goal by submerging the large truck fatality rate with the bus and motorcoach fatality rate and then measuring the combined rate not against commercial motor vehicle miles of travel, but instead against the combined miles traveled of all motor vehicles, including passenger cars and even motorcycles. This newly concocted fatality rate is now more than an order of magnitude lower than the previous large truck fatality rate. This is not a direct exposure measure of the large truck fatality rate and is intended to mislead the public. FMCSA is adept at adjusting its goals to protect it against public criticism, but inept at actually improving safety to protect the public.

Conducting Safety Compliance Reviews of Truck and Bus Companies - F

The agency only conducts between 7,000 and 11,000 compliance reviews (CRs) each year out of more than 700,000 registered motor carriers. This constitutes only about 1.5 percent of all carriers reviewed each year. Most motor carriers remain unrated or have badly outdated ratings. This is particularly true of motorcoaches. The low number of CRs fails to detect most dangerous carriers and provides no deterrent effect on carriers violating the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. Similarly, Unsatisfactory safety ratings do not result in motor carriers being immediately stopped from operating, as has been recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board, but only constitute a warning to a motor carrier to correct safety management deficiencies. Almost no motor carriers receiving a warning letter about an Unsatisfactory or conditional safety fitness rating are stopped from operating.

Meeting Congressional Deadlines & Mandates to Issue Health and Safety Rules - F

FMCSA regularly fails to act on congressionally mandated legislative deadlines for rulemaking actions and final regulations for years, in some cases violating the deadlines by more than a decade. When the agency does finally act, it is only in response to safety organization lawsuits that forced it to comply with statutory requirements. It then proposes and adopts regulations that violate the law, were previously overturned in federal court, or reduce safety compliance for the motor carrier industry to almost nothing, such as its recent proposed rule for Electronic On Board Recorders (EOBRs) to record truck driver driving time. The proposed rule would result in a mandate to use EOBRs on only 0.07 to 0.14 percent of the more than 700,000 motor carriers registered with FMCSA.

Issuing Hours of Service Rules that Improve Truck Driver Health and Safety - F

FMCSA has dramatically increased commercial driver hours of service since 2003, by advancing the number of hours a driver can work over an 8-day tour of duty by about 40 percent or almost 100 hours of work, and the number of hours a driver can operate a truck by about 28 percent, up to as much as 88 hours over an 8-day tour of duty. Despite this dramatic increase, the agency claims that it has no evidence that this more demanding regime will increase truck driver fatigue, increase crash risk, or increases adverse impacts on driver health, despite many studies showing driving performance degrades rapidly after eight hours of driving.

Keeping the Southern Border closed to Mexico-Domiciled Trucks Until it is Safe - F

FMCSA for several years has performed almost no Compliance Reviews of the tens of thousands of Mexico-domiciled motor carriers making millions of crossings into the U.S. border zone each year. The agency also has failed to upgrade the data it relies on to identify the convictions and other violations of Mexico-domiciled truck drivers. FMCSA has not corrected widespread Mexico-domiciled truck driver violations of the requirement for hours of service logbooks, with over 15 percent of these drivers operating in the U.S. without complying with federal requirements for these records of duty status. In addition, FMCSA and the U.S. Department of Transportation are attempting to implement a fake pilot program with 100 hand-picked long-haul Mexico-domiciled trucking companies to allow them to roam nationwide to deliver and pick up freight in order to force open the border to unrestricted commercial traffic from Mexico before the end of 2008. FMCSA has acknowledged that at least half the states are not even putting border-zone-only trucks out of service when they are found to be operating beyond their legal authority that was granted by the agency. Nevertheless, FMCSA wants to force the issue of interstate operations of Mexico-domiciled motor carriers despite the fact that safety data, oversight, and enforcement systems are not ready.

Making Information Available to the Public About Unsafe Truck and Bus Companies - Safety Scoring System (SafeStat) - F

FMCSA uses a severely flawed system of relativist, peer-to-peer safety rankings for scoring motor carrier safety that allows the worst carriers to continue to operate undetected, that has no statistical basis, and has been severely criticized in several oversight reports issued by the U.S. DOT Office of the Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office, and the Oakridge National Laboratory

Using Technology like Electronic On-Board Recorders to Enforce HOS Rules and Reduce Cheating - F

After years of procrastination and false starts, FMCSA has finally proposed a regulation for the mandatory use of electronic on-board recorders (EOBRs) to monitor and record the driving time in each shift of truck and bus drivers in order to improve compliance with truck drivers hours of service limits. The agency was severely criticized by the federal appellate court in 2004 when the court overturned the agency’s hours of service regulations that could force truck drivers to work up to 40 percent more hours in an 8-day tour of duty and drive up to 28 percent more hours over that period. When the DOT issued its final HOS regulation in 2003, it dropped the requirement for EOBRs proposed in 2000. The agency finally published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking in 2004 after severe criticism by the court. The current proposed regulation published in early 2007 would require EOBRs on only about six one-hundredths of one percent of motor carriers registered with FMCSA – about 465 each year out of more than 702,000 registered interstate motor carriers. This absurd proposal shows that FMCSA is not really interested in reducing HOS violations and stopping truck drivers from regularly falsifying their paper logbooks, called comic books.

Requiring “Behind the Wheel” Training for New Commercial Drivers - F

Despite a lawsuit compelling the agency to act to provide sound commercial driver and skills training, as directed by Congress in 1991 legislation, FMCSA issued a regulation on entry-level driver training that would apply to almost no novice drivers and did not comprise any basic knowledge and skills training in conformity with its own curriculum and its own contractor’s report that the private sector was providing inadequate training. In a lawsuit brought by safety groups, that rule was overturned in federal court, but the agency has not complied with the court’s remand of the regulation despite the passage of more than a year. Similarly, Congress directed the agency to require specialized training for the drivers of longer combination vehicles (LCVs) that use two and even three trailers pulled by a tractor, but the agency issued a final rule that grandfathers 97 percent of LCV drivers, who will never have to take any training, and delays any training for others.

Squandering Public Resources to Fund Research Advancing the Trucking Industry’s Economic Priorities Rather Than Public Safety - A

A.   Tainted and Misuse of Research – the Large Truck Crash Causation Study

FMCSA is already infamous for ignoring every basic scientific, peer-accepted research principle in designing and conducting their investigations. The agency’s Large Truck Crash Causation Study was a disaster costing U.S. taxpayers more than $20 million in wasted funds for a multi-year effort that received devastating criticism of inadequacy by the National Academy of Sciences, the Centers for Disease Control of the National Institutes of Health, and by leading safety organizations who published critical reviews of the data collection and research design of this expensive failure. The conclusions of the LTCCS are completely unreliable because the data collected are mostly worthless.

FMCSA is also famous for promoting and funding researchers to produce poorly supported papers purportedly showing that the majority of car-big truck crashes are the “fault” of the small vehicle drivers. In fact, there are several studies showing that the split is about 50 – 50 percent and yet other studies that show that the majority of crashes are triggered by truck driver behavior. The facts reveal one thing for certain: government statistics show year after year that in one big truck – one passenger vehicle crashes, 98 percent of the people who die are in the passenger vehicles. Big trucks are dramatically overrepresented in fatal crashes with passenger vehicles.

B.   Wasting Taxpayer Money on “Education” Programs that Blame Car Drivers Rather Than Truck Safety Deficiencies

To date, FMCSA’s education efforts have been repeatedly criticized by federal government oversight bodies such as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the entire truck safety community as a waste of effort and scarce federal safety dollars.   GAO found that the “Share the Road Safely/No Zone” program was completely unscientific and had no objective measurements of safety improvement, including no ability to show actual crash reductions. The Share the Road effort has been used by FMCSA primarily to shift the burden of big truck crash deaths from the trucking industry to the drivers of passenger vehicles. This propaganda effort has failed, but the agency and the industry are persistent in using federal funds to keep prosecuting its war against car drivers to divert attention from the incredible over-representation of big trucks in fatal crashes. In fact, although big trucks are only 3 to 4 percent of registered vehicles, they are responsible for 12 to 13 percent of all traffic fatalities each year. More recently, FMCSA has again joined with the trucking industry to put enforcement officials in the cabs of tractor-trailer rigs in order to nab supposed car drivers as the supposed offenders in traffic. Once, again this “gotcha” action is providing more propaganda for the trucking industry, and it is funded with our tax dollars.