Out-of-Service (OOS) violations increased in 2013 during the annual 72-hour Roadcheck safety inspection blitz held across North America June 4-6 this year, according to data released this week by the Commercial Vehicle safety Alliance (CVSA), which helps sponsor the yearly event.
The group said the OOS rate for vehicles reached 24.1% out of the 47,771 North American Standard Level I inspections conducted – compared to 22.4% out of 48,815 Level I inspections completed during Roadcheck 2012 – with the driver OOS rate hitting 4.3 % out of a total of 71,630 driver inspections, compared to 3.9% last year.
Altogether, some 10,000 CVSA and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) inspectors at 2,500 locations conducted a total 73,023 truck and bus inspections during Roadcheck 2013, with new technologies being deployed to help improve inspection techniques for critical components such as brakes.
For example, performance based brake testers or “PBBTs” were used during Roadcheck 2013, CVSA reported, with 9 U.S. states and one Canadian province equipped with PBBT systems for enforcement use. Of the 287 enforcement inspections conducted with a PBBT, 36 vehicles or 12.5% were found with overall braking efficiency below the minimum required by U.S. regulations as well as standard North American OOS criteria, the group said.
“PBBTs are being used to better evaluate stopping distance capability out in the field,” Steve Keppler, CVSA’s executive director, told Fleet Owner. “We’re also using better tools combined with inspection histories and mapping data to help inspectors focus more on the ‘high risk’ actors as well.”
That “tighter focus” on truck and bus companies with problematic safety records may also be behind the higher OOS rates recorded this year, Keppler added.
“The targeting techniques are getting far more sophisticated, such as using infrared systemsto spot ‘hot’ brakes, and we’ll see more such techniques honed and deployed in the future,” he stressed.
Other Roadcheck 2013 findings released by CVSA include:
- Some 899 seatbelt violations were issued by inspectors.
- Cargo securement related violations represented 11.7% of all OOS violations issued during the event, down slightly from 12.3% in 2012. Although this equates to only one out of every 50 vehicles inspected, loss of a load by a commercial truck is always a severe risk to safety, CVSA stressed.
- Brake-related OOS violations reached 49.6%.
- Approximately 1,000 commercial vehicles were inspected every hour during the 72-hour event this year.
“The strong enforcement presence involved in Roadcheck and throughout the year is a critical component in our safety efforts across North America,” noted Mark Savage, CVSA’s president and a major with the Colorado State Patrol. “Motor carrier safety enforcement is ultimately about improving the safety of our nations’ roadways for all drivers and passengers.”
He emphasized during a speech given back in June at the start of Roadcheck 2013 that CVSA believes motor carrier safety enforcement activities like Roadcheck are ultimately about improving the safety of the nations’ roadways for all drivers and passengers.
“Ultimately, we want to reduce crashes and save lives. Inspectors are looking for the bad actors—a minority of operators on the road—whose vehicles are not well maintained or whose drivers are fatigued or otherwise operating in an unsafe manner,” he explained. “Our ultimate goal is to take unsafe drivers and vehicles off the road
