Brake inspection blitz this week: Roadside inspection system should be 'preventive,' not punitive

Overdrive Radio

With the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s annual Brake Safety Week inspection initiative kicking off August 26 with stepped-up brake checks and inspections, generally, in jurisdictions across North America, we’re looking back at a podcast from earlier in the year – February 2024 to be exact. The episode featured Wisconsin-headquartered owner-operator Warren McCurdy and a central point of view about what he feels the roadside inspection system was designed for. Something that’s, well, gotten a little off track with how states, the FMCSA, and some fleets treat so-called “safey scores” derived from inspections and associated violations. As you’re hauling this week, if you get a quote unquote “assist” from an inspector out there, take note of the approach he or she takes. Is it “prevention” of accidents that is the ultimate goal? McCurdy, at the top of the podcast, made clear his bone to pick with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's CSA scoring program and all its ripple effects throughout trucking and roadside inspection systems. After a trailer tire lost air in transit sufficient to take the tire off the rim -- the trailer empty, the tire problem unnoticed by McCurdy before inspection -- the owner-operator's leasing carrier assessed points for the violation modeled on the FMCSA's internal Driver Safety Measurement System nearly enough to void McCurdy's lease. This sort of "accountability" isn't, the owner-operator felt, what roadside inspections were designed for. The inspector in this case in Washington State did his job to the letter, and caught the in-transit flattened tire in plenty time to save any real damaging outcome. For all that, McCurdy is thankful. "I think that these inspections are good. They should be preventative things," he said. "Nobody wants to go down the road with flat tires." Yet, he added, "I don't think we should be penalized for something that is not something that you did intentionally." That goes for the motor carrier as well. There's a reason carriers like his own assess those points -- because they are incurring the same level of severity weighting in the Carrier SMS. Potential changes to the Carrier SMS notwithstanding (FMCSA isn't looking at those same changes for the Driver SMS), the podcast this week dives back into what’s at issue in cases like these, in which carriers subject to the severity weighting system for violations pass that on, with their own systems to hold drivers and owner-operators to a degree of accountability themselves, relying on the federal points system to assess and prevent damage to their own scores. Susan McCurdy tried her hand at the DataQs system in a vain attempt to contain the damage in this case by challenging the violation. But given the inspector was doing what he should have done here -- alerting McCurdy to the problem tire on his trailer, conducting an inspection, then reporting the results into the federal system as required -- there was nothing DataQs was going to be able to help correct about the fundamental nature of the situation. More fundamentally, though, it’s the very nature of the CSA scoring system that makes accountability problematic for owner-operator McCurdy here. Nobody indeed intends to run around with flat tires. With respect to any violation, McCurdy urges regulators take a long hard look at what they’re holding carriers and drivers accountable for by scoring them as they do. More in Overdrive's long-running CSA's Data Trail series: http://overdriveonline.com/csas-data-trail Find plenty in the way of brakes-related maintenance and inspection resources at this page: https://www.overdriveonline.com/maintenance/article/14875428/tractor-trailer-maintenance-for-ownerops-to-outrun-inspectors