Editorial: Forewarned, Yes; But Forearmed?

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The Federal Highway Administration sent a loud and clear signal to trucking last week: Be prepared for a sea change in the way the government conducts its safety enforcement of the industry.

We hope this does not mean that the era of “partnership” is over, because that would be counter-productive.

Yet, it appears that a cooperative approach to safety regulation will be replaced by greater enforcement efforts — and the industry can be assured that FHWA officials will take some high-profile actions against trucking companies in the near future to underline the shift in direction.

The change was trumpeted by Julie Cirillo, the agency’s top trucking regulator, during an appearance before the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, D.C., last week and by other FHWA officials at a regional meeting of American Trucking Association’s Safety Management Council in Pennsylvania. The announcements were clearly designed to signal an end to the agency’s cooperative approach that marked the reign of Cirillo’s predecessor, George Reagle.

While Cirillo defended the agency’s past enforcement efforts, and said much of the problem was one of perception and not reality, the change in direction she described seems designed more to appease headline-grabbing critics of the government’s safety programs than to improve safety.

We couldn’t agree more with FHWA’s decision to expand its enforcement efforts, because the industry knows well the importance of safety to its business and to the nation.

But we don’t believe any safety campaign can be successful in the long term without the cooperation of the industry. FHWA’s reaching out to trucking — typical of the federal government’s attempt in the past decade to act as a partner with business rather than as a dictator — has been very successful, and the agency shouldn’t let criticism cause it to abandon that approach.

Rather, the agency should be moving to improve its relationship with the industry as its expands its enforcement drive, since voluntary compliance is at the heart of all safety programs. After all, the government will never have anywhere near enough inspectors to watch every truck on every highway.

FHWA should, indeed, fix the parts of safety compliance that it believes are broken, but it also must retain the things that are working, and one of the most important is its partnering with the trucking industry.