Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/127433
T he largest truck fleets show crash rates well above those of one-truck carriers, yet the megafleet trucks and drivers are inspected at only a fourth of the rate of single-truck operations, according to Overdrive's analysis of federal data. Single-truck independent drivers, the safest group on the highway, are 3.5 times more likely to be put out of service than drivers for carriers with 500 or Max Heine One-truck independent owner-operators have the lowest rate of truck-involved crashes, but are far more likely to be put out of service than drivers for carriers with 500 or more trucks, which have a much higher rate of crashing. CSA_Crash_Flaw.indd 23 more trucks. The carrier crash data was compiled by Overdrive publisher Randall-Reilly Business Media's RigDig Business Intelligence unit (rigdig.com/bi). It covers the 2010-12 calendar years, including the first two years of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, launched in December 2010 by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. FMCSA official Duane DeBruyne declined to comment on any aspect of Overdrive's analysis. For one-truck operators, these enforcement disparities entail not simply the day-to-day hassles of dealing with a well-armed regulatory regime. The bad ratings that come with violations and out-of-service orders make it increasingly difficult to secure freight in a safetyscoring landscape tilted in favor of their larger competitors. While single-truck operators are the safest, accident rates – measured per million miles traveled – spike when those operators start adding trucks. The highest rates were found in fleets of two to 15 trucks. This isn't surprising, given that fleets in that range often have no full-time manager – let alone a full-time safety director – and tend to be less restrictive in screening prospective drivers. But at the extreme ends of carrier size, the disconnect between driver outof-service rates and carrier crash rates highlights seemingly intractable problems for small fleets at roadside, says Richard Wilson, regulatory manager with Trans Products Trans Services. Wilson believes, as do others, that too many inspectors, as well as FMCSA investigators, view small fleets as lowhanging fruit. For inspectors, the small fleets are easy revenue through citations. For investigators, it's the numbers game – activity measured by fleet count – public agencies play to justify their existence. "The larger carriers with full safety staffs and supported by big trucking organizations have an advantage because they're labor-intensive for FMCSA investigative staff," Wilson says. "They're time-consuming, and for the value of the amount of violations found and the amount of people FMCSA will have to put in place to do it, they become unfeasible. ... It's much more efficient to compile large numbers of interventions on smaller carriers that provide the numbers necessary to meet the standards of the budget offices." Speaking at the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance spring meeting in Louisville, Ky., FMCSA Associate Administrator for Enforcement Bill Quade, however, suggested that the agency's outsize attention to small carriers is just a reflection of the industry's makeup, given that most entities involved in trucking are in fact small. The stellar accident record of onetruck independents, in some sense, is to be expected. "A guy that owns his own truck has his life savings in that truck" in many cases, says Phil McGuire, president of Texas-based McGuire Transportation, which has roughly a 100-truck mix of owner-operator and (mostly) company-owned trucks. "He doesn't want to put a scratch on it, much less be in an accident." Managing only yourself, McGuire adds, "you can do a lot better" keeping a handle on safety. When carriers of any size have negative CSA percentile rankings in the public BASICs (Behavioral Analysis Safety Improvement Categories), brokers, shippers and insurance companies now are more interested. J. Webb Kline, owner of a Pennsylvania-based six-truck fleet, said in February he'd lost in the neighborhood of "$1.5 million in sales over the past year because brokers and shippers look at our score [in the Hours of Service Compliance BASIC] and think we're high risk. And we lost some of our best accounts because they aren't allowed to load our trucks, even though they need them." Kline's ranking problem was primarily the public Hours BASIC, with scoring information visible to anyone with a Web connection. FMCSA continues to keep ranking data private in the Crash Indicator BASIC, but carriers' federally recordable crash data – minus the ranking and any indication of who was May 2013 | Overdrive | 23 5/1/13 9:48 AM