In the days before the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, drivers might not have batted an eye if an inspector did a quick walk-around and, finding nothing obvious to cite, waved them on their merry way without finishing a full inspection.
Today, though, traditional wisdom about inspections – best avoided, given the hassles and potential violations – has been upended. As any small fleet owner or independent knows, clean inspections are the only immediate way to improve categorical percentile rankings in CSA’s Safety Measurement System. The stakes are so high that it’s now common for carriers to offer cash bonuses for clean inspections.
Without a clean inspection, the only way to discount the weight of prior violations is to wait for them to “age,” reducing the time weighting associated in the scores, before they drop out after two years.
Though the bite of those rankings has dulled a bit with congressional action last year to pull the scores from public view, recent reports in Overdrive have shown that they remain a part of the process of securing business for many.
The good news is that compared to 2011’s nationwide clean-inspection rate, the 2015 rate shows a near 10 percent gain. This means that compliance is improving or more states are doing what Mississippi Department of Transportation Office of Law Enforcement Chief Willie Huff says is common in his state: Finishing the job.
