Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/409537
36 | Overdrive | November 2014 DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS trucks" in the maintenance department. Go east from San Antonio on I-10, he says, and "there are two super-coops" between there and Houston that he's never seen open. On the other hand, the I-35 scale at Pearsall, between Laredo and San Antonio, is nearly always open for business-type hours, northbound "feed- ing on oilfield and Mexican national trucks," he says, southbound on any rig suspected of oilfield work. Texas also is above average both for a high rate of violations per inspection and a low percentage of clean inspections. Overdrive reader R.C. Simmons runs only in Texas and has been inspected six times in eight years, but only one of those inspections was clean. "My problem with inspections is the variants in how and what they inspect," varying not just by state but even from inspector to inspector, as Simmons and others tell it. "It's never consistent," he says. "I have even heard an inspector at the New Waverly scale house on I-45 north of Houston make the statement: 'Well, that's my one clean inspection for today.' No, it was not me with the clean inspection, and it was 4 a.m., her first inspection of the day!" Reader Jack Simon says inspectors have a clear advantage "since they can find something wrong with any truck they want, if they choose to use every rule that they have in the book." In the maintenance realm, it's clear that Texas is doing a good job of that. Many states increasingly have adopted a safety approach that focuses more on violations associated with the most common crash causation factors, which are elements of driver behavior. Yet of the 10 states with the highest truck-in- volved fatality-crash rates, Virginia and Texas exceed the national average for maintenance violations as a percentage of all violations, 72.6 percent. Texas was singled out on this em- phasis in the American Transportation Research Institute's summer 2014 report on regional disparities in inspections and violations. It highlighted the ratio of light violations to speeding violations as an example of focusing on maintenance ver- sus driver behavior. The report, computed by the Vigillo company, found a national average of 12 light violations for every speeding violation. The ratio varied from 1.9 in Indiana to 321 in Texas. Focus placed on truck instead oF trucker Text INFO to 205-289-3555 or visit www.ovdinfo.com