Comparatively speaking, Wisconsin doesn’t perform a lot of truck or driver inspections. The three inspections for every lane-mile of national highway system roadway in its borders that it conducted in 2014 puts it down in the lower tier of states for inspection intensity in Overdrive’s analysis.
But in another metric, it’s almost tied for first in the nation: violations per inspection. It joins Connecticut, which we profiled in the October 2014 issue, at the top of the rankings for toughest states for truckers, with more than three violations issued for every inspection performed.
However you slice it, the state’s clearly taking a targeted-enforcement approach that leaves little room for improvement of carriers’ Compliance, Safety, Accountability scores with clean inspections.
J. Webb Kline, owner of the Pennsylvania-based Cream of the Crop small fleet, saw once again earlier this year how a single adverse inspection can send one or more of the CSA program’s Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category (BASIC) percentile rankings into the veritable stratosphere.
Seemingly overnight, Cream of the Crop shot up above the 90th percentile in the Hours of Service Compliance BASIC. With an hours score above the “intervention threshold,” signaled by the golden triangle in the carrier’s CSA Safety Measurement System profile, Kline’s fleet automatically will be placed in the “inspect” category in the federal Inspection Selection System, with a score above 75. Hours of Service is the only single CSA BASIC treated this way in the ISS.
The problematic inspection occurred when a local sheriff, in concert with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, wouldn’t let a driver correct a log book mistake he’d made prior to a single-vehicle, no-fault accident. Ultimately, more than one hours violation was issued. If anything, the only violation should have been form and manner, Kline concluded after having the logs audited.
