Most of us who have been in the motor carrier industry for a few years are familiar with the annual 72-hour International Roadcheck. For 2016, this 72-hour targeted enforcement and inspection event is scheduled to occur June 7 to 9. Roadside inspection and enforcement officers conduct an extraordinary number of commercial motor vehicle and truck driver inspections during this period. The aggressive roadside inspection effort of 2015 resulted in an estimated 10,000 CVSA and FMCSA inspectors participating at over 2,450 permanent and temporary inspection locations, resulting in 69,472 total inspections—an average of 965 inspections per hour. Most inspections were completed using the North American Standard Level I Inspection, which includes both CMV and driver review and is the most thorough roadside inspection.
The Out-of-Service (OOS) violation percentage distributions (numbers indicate a percentage of the total OOS violations by category) from 2013-15 are shown below:
Above chart courtesy of Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) http://www.cvsa.org/programs/int_roadcheck.php
As you can see, brakes, lights, and tires, along with cargo securement or safe loading, continue to be the top OOS violations cited for CMVs. For truck drivers, record of duty status (RODS), or hours of service (HOS), continues to lead the way for being the top OOS violation category. For HazMat haulers, absent or improper shipping and placarding led the way, followed by improper cargo securement or loading.
So, let’s discuss the good and bad for the upcoming 2016 International Roadcheck. If your trucking company is grappling with high Compliance Safety and Accountability data and Safety Management Systems (SMS) scores, this can be a great opportunity to make a positive impact and quickly improve your scores. On the other hand, if your company is not ready and ignores that almost three times the normal roadside inspections take place during this 72-hour period, your scores could be adversely affected. Keeping your scores low is an important goal, as high scores can result in an FMCSA intervention. So, to keep scores low—or to help lower high scores—do your due diligence to increase the number of clean, violation-free inspections that your company has.
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