Michigan-based Eagle Express small fleet owner Leander Richmond got a bit of a DataQs victory last year, but it didn’t come easily. Richmond was using the system in a common way — disputing what to him was an officer’s obvious misinterpretation of safety regulation. In this case, it was a driver charged at roadside in Michigan with violating the federal cell-phone-use statute.
Like Richmond, many owner-operators and small-fleet owners report having used the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s DataQs system. Administered in cooperation with state enforcement jurisdictions, DataQs is the principal protocol for carriers, drivers and others to challenge or simply correct information collected about them -- crash information, inspections and their associated violations, chiefly.
In Richmond’s case, no citation for cell-phone use was issued, and the driver was not utilizing the phone for anything other than GPS at the time of the stop, as the officer’s examination of the phone revealed, Richmond said. The federal prohibition on handheld device use does not include GPS purposes, as Richmond pointed out, but rather handheld use while talking or texting, among other types of uses.
Richmond’s first attempt to challenge the violation dragged on for more than eight months. His goal was to have it removed from his company’s and the driver’s records in the Compliance, Safety, Accountability and Pre-Employment Screening Program systems. Richmond’s description of his frustrating efforts is of a piece with other horror stories around challenging violations.
