Senior Reporter
Texas, Indiana Counties Issue Most CSA Points, Vigillo’s Bryan Says
But don’t blame the inspectors, said Steven Bryan, president of Portland, Oregon-based Vigillo. They’re just doing their jobs, and they’re very busy.
Fourteen counties in Texas border Mexico where trucks cross in large numbers into the United States. In the past two years, those counties have accounted for 12.3 million of the 77.6 million CSA points assessed against all carriers in the continental states, Bryan said.
The violations, which can range from one to 10 points each, assessed in the border counties mostly are maintenance-related, Bryan said.
“Dozens and dozens and dozens of trucks, hundreds of them per hour, per day, are coming back into the United States,” Bryan said at an April 1 webinar.
Because every vehicle passes through an inspection station when crossing the border, in those counties there is a higher ratio of violations, and carriers who travel in those 14 counties are at greater risk for a higher number of CSA points, Bryan said.
Likewise, three counties in Indiana issue a disparate number of unsafe driving violations.
“Those of you who operate in the state of Indiana will know well that they are notorious for being tough on speeders,” Bryan said. “They’re not shy about it; they’re proud of it.”
Marion County, which is a crossroads for several interstates located in the center of Indiana, is another CSA outlier.
“They have had 80,000 CSA points flow from that county alone in the last two years,” Bryan said. “That’s the absolute grand champion county in all of the U.S. — by far.”
Lake and Porter counties in the northwest corner of Indiana also are CSA outliers. In those two counties, Bryan said, law enforcement makes a deliberate effort to slow down traffic moving east from Chicago.
“Maybe Indiana has it right,” Bryan said. “Maybe they are focused on exactly the right thing with data behind them that when trucks slow down, we have fewer crashes.”
But the fact that the United States is so diverse, Bryan said it would be “a fool’s errand” to believe that enforcement is consistent across the 3,100 U.S. counties.
“The problem is, that’s what CSA believes is going to happen,” Bryan said. “That’s the way it’s built.”
He added, “It has no accommodation to account for the fact that a county in the middle of Oregon up in the mountains is simply not the same as a county on the Texas border or the county that surrounds Indianapolis.”
