Report Card - Sorrow to Strength 2007

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