Fleets Say Woes Continue Despite New Chassis Rule

This story appears in the June 17 print edition of Transport Topics.

Intermodal truckers, who have been fighting since 1997 to improve chassis maintenance, say that goal remains elusive today, four years after the rule meant to address the problem went into effect.

“It’s been very frustrating,” said Curtis Whalen, executive director of American Trucking Associations’ Intermodal Motor Carriers Conference, who cited ongoing inadequate chassis repairs that hurt truckers financially and operationally. “This has gone on for so long. We are not where we want to be.”

The goal when the campaign began was to create a federal standard that clearly assigned responsibilities for chassis maintenance among the parties. Motor carriers long have complained that chassis provided by ocean carriers were prone to light, brake and tire failures that penalized truckers, who absorbed citations and financial penalties for equipment that wasn’t theirs.

It took eight years from the time ATA sought chassis equipment standards until such a standard was mandated in a 2005 federal law. And then four more years elapsed while the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration wrote rules that took effect June 17, 2009.

Since then, ocean carriers have gradually sold their chassis to leasing companies or placed them in equipment pools, leaving truckers to fend for themselves.

“We know no system is going to be perfect,” said Kevin Lhotak, president of Reliable Transportation Specialists, based in Chesterton, Ind. “But there are people out there that flat-out refuse to fix equipment until the driver finds something wrong. There are some good facilities out there, and there are others that are horrible.”

Despite the truckers’ disappointment, there is broad agreement that intermodal equipment safety has improved, at least somewhat.

One clear sign of progress is the decline in chassis out-of-service orders by inspectors since the law took effect, said Jack Van Steenburg, chief safety officer at FMCSA.

That rate has dropped from 23% in 2009 to 15% today, well below the 21% level for trucking as a whole, he reported at a May 2 industry meeting.

“I am very appreciative of that,” he said.

Other law enforcement officials are supporters as well.

“We are moving in the right direction,” said Stephen Keppler, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, though he noted there still are problems with inspectors who don’t properly assign violations to the tractor or the chassis.

“The legislation created awareness and consistent standards that are good for the driver, the equipment provider and the shipper, as well as the driving public,” said Keith Lovetro, CEO of chassis lessor Trac Intermodal, headquartered in Princeton, N.J. His company spent $100 million last year to buy chassis, mostly from ocean carriers.

“Training and enforcement are improving,” he said, and his company has increased maintenance and repair spending per chassis by 16% since 2009.

“We are seeing improved utilization and improved equipment quality, which both add value to the supply chain and result in positive economic impacts,” Lovetro added.

Don Kassilke, a representative of the Washington-based Ocean Carrier Equipment Management Association trade group, also likes today’s chassis market structure.

“The story here is largely a success story,” said Kassilke, a Washington attorney, at the May 2 meeting. “Unfortunately, we don’t hear enough about the successes. Are there bad [intermodal equipment providers], bad drivers, et cetera? Sure there are.

The good ones are tarred by the bad actors.”

Joni Casey, president of the Intermodal Association of North America, said the chassis pools have been “a favorable development that improved both the utilization and condition of equipment.”

“Are the roadability rules perfect? No,” she said, using the informal industry term for chassis maintenance standards. The rules imposed what the industry couldn’t achieve on its own, she added.

“Intermodal equipment roadability is a dynamic process and will continue to evolve and transition,” she said. “And there’s always room for process improvement.

Process improvement is exactly where FMCSA is focused right now, Van Steenburg said, with three inspection blitzes scheduled later this year.

The agency will look closely at whether providers are actually offering chassis that are roadable and whether drivers actually submit reports of defects when they turn in equipment.

Kassilke said less than half of 1% of drivers submit defect reports when they return the chassis.

“If everything works, we should have a perfect system,” Van Steenburg said at the May 2 meeting. “That is not the case right now.”

Whalen said drivers aren’t committed to the defect-reporting program because they are afraid defects they identify will hurt them by worsening their Compliance, Safety, Accountability scores.

Whalen, Lhotak and other truckers such as Joel Henry, president of Intermodal Cartage, based in Memphis, Tenn., and Sam Farruggio, owner of Farruggio’s Express, Bristol, Pa., found a wide range of other maintenance-related problems, and expect even greater ones next month when FMCSA’s hours-of-service rule changes hit.

They also noted progress on one front.

Farruggio said that “the railroads have taken a more positive approach” to chassis. By purchasing chassis with radial tires, inflation systems and LED lights, “they have accepted the responsibility for the equipment condition. They have to see an economic advantage for them.”

Railroads control 20% of the chassis, which are 53-foot units used solely for domestic freight. Henry said FMCSA’s CSA rules are particularly unfair to drayage carriers “because we are pulling equipment that is not ours. Chassis in pools aren’t being repaired as if we owned them.”

Inflated CSA scores also cause a financial burden, Whalen said, that extends far beyond the traditional, continuing disputes over who should pay for repairs to damaged tires.

Bad CSA scores because of problems on others’ equipment are especially tough on intermodal truckers, Henry said, because they are being judged by standards that primarily apply to truckload and other carriers that own their own equipment.

“It is important that we get this equipment upgraded,” Henry said. “We will be safer. We also will bring our productivity up.”

Better-maintained equipment also will help retain drivers, Henry said, by keeping CSA scores under control.

That should appeal to drayage drivers who have chosen to do lower-paying intermodal runs because they are home almost every night.

“We still have a little hurdle to overcome,” Farruggio said. “The rule was meant to encompass a more level playing field.

“If we do something wrong, we should be responsible. If something happens to a chassis in the normal course of business, it shouldn’t be our fault.”

That doesn’t always happen in practice, he said, citing the example of tire failures. There is no way to determine whether the driver caused the problem or a previous repair such as a patch gave out, illustrating a problem that still hasn’t been resolved.

Russ Graef, CEO of Containerport Group, Cleveland, said a particular problem is unserviceable chassis with containers that are already mounted when the driver arrives for a pickup. When that happens, he said, drivers’ time is wasted while a roadworthy chassis is found and the container placed on good equipment.

“That is the No. 1 problem today,” he said.

Henry agreed.

“That is one of the significant challenges we see. We don’t want broken-down equipment,” he said. “We don’t want drivers going through roadability [repair] lines. That is just eating up valuable HOS time.”

Those repair lines hold up truckers for a minimum of 30 minutes and as much as three hours, carriers say.

Lhotak and others believe the hours-of-service rule changes also will force fleets to make major changes.

“Roadability will become a bigger concern as of July 1,” he said, because drivers will have to take a rest break that will reduce working hours.

That will increase the negative effects on productivity whenever chassis have to be repaired so they are roadworthy, he explained. In turn, that will increase the possibility of substantial delays.

“We are going to see loads that are not going to make the train or ship because of that roadability issue,” Lhotak said.

The situation will be most severe on shipments that are picked up and dropped off far outside metropolitan areas, where it will take several hours for a relief driver and equipment to reach a load that’s headed for a particular train or ship.

“We are trying to educate shippers about what the effects will be,” Lhotak said, and telling them their shipments may be slowed by a day.

Henry believes hours-of-service rules will reduce Intermodal Cartage’s profitability by 8% to 12%.

Lights, which account for about 60% of out-of-service violations, based on FMCSA data, continue to be a particular problem.

Graef said his drivers carry light kits to make on-road fixes as needed.

Whalen said truckers are unfairly saddled with violations when a light is jiggled loose because it couldn’t be inspected.

Those frequent failures that typically aren’t the trucker’s fault give inspectors probable cause to do full-scale inspections to look for other defects, he added.

Despite the problems, there also are multiple signs that participants in the process want to keep working together and that truckers are taking more control of the chassis function.

Henry praised FMCSA for listening to and responding to some industry concerns.

To balance his criticism, Whalen also said progress has been made in the form of better equipment.

“At a bare minimum, the law gave us a focus,” Whalen said. “I don’t think anyone disputes that there has to be a system of maintenance in place. That wasn’t the case before the law was passed.”

Van Steenburg reiterated the agency’s willingness to work with the industry to make effective changes, such as the 2010 creation of a uniform chassis program supervised by IANA.

Henry said his company has installed in-cab equipment to be sure drivers submit equipment-defect reports to improve productivity and cut down on paperwork.

Intermodal Cartage also has addressed equipment condition by purchasing 1,500 of its own chassis and participating in the North American Chassis Pool Cooperative arranged through Whalen’s group.

Whalen believes equipment condition would improve if “a couple of equipment providers were shut down until they completed repairs properly. That would send a ripple through the industry, and we would be on our way.”

None of the 100 intermodal equipment providers has been shut down so far, according to FMCSA records.