FMCSA Assumes More Power to Shutter Unsafe Carriers
This story appears in the Jan. 27 print edition of Transport Topics.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced new steps it has taken to obtain regulatory and investigative power more quickly to shut down unsafe motor carriers.
One of the actions, a final rule on “patterns of safety violations,” will enable FMCSA to shut down a for-hire carrier or remove a company officer with a history of purposely violating safety regulations.
The regulation “complements a rule adopted by the agency in 2012 to apply out-of-service orders to reincarnated or chameleon carriers and to consolidate their enforcement histories,” FMCSA said in its Jan. 22 rule.
“Today’s rule goes one step further by authorizing a complete revocation of the motor carrier’s authority to operate,” FMCSA said.
The second action is to train all FMCSA investigators to apply the same investigative methods used last year during a targeted motor coach investigative effort, “Operation Quick Strike.” The eight-month program resulted in 52 bus companies and 340 vehicles being removed from the roads, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
“The investigative techniques that were developed by the team for the motor coach safety initiative are techniques that all of our investigators will have by the end of the year,” FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said at the Transportation Research Board annual meeting Jan. 14. “The objective for us is to continue to use what we’re learning to get better.”
The bus operation between April and November last year included more than 50 specially trained investigators. They conducted in-depth reviews into the patterns and practices of the 250 most at-risk motor coach companies identified using roadside-inspection and safety data.
Companies were shut down because they failed to adequately maintain their vehicles, did not have proper drug-and-alcohol testing programs and had widespread hours-of-service violations.
In addition, inspectors assessed the levels of safety for more than 1,300 companies that had minimal inspection history or data with the agency, targeting more than 240 companies for follow-up investigations.
The additional training was announced less than three months after a National Transportation Safety Board report raised questions about FMCSA’s oversight.
NTSB said it was concerned that FMCSA missed “red flags” before four fatal collisions — two involving trucks and two involving buses — that resulted in 25 deaths and 83 injuries.
NTSB questioned the quality of FMCSA’s compliance checks, as well as its “increasing reliance” on narrow reviews that examine a “limited portion of the commercial operation.”
So far, NTSB has not received a response, a spokesman said. A DOT spokeswoman did not return a phone message requesting comment.
FMCSA declined comment, but spokesman Duane DeBruyne confirmed: “FMCSA investigators are receiving additional training on the new investigative tactics used during Operation Quick Strike.”
At a news conference earlier this month, NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said her agency has removed bus safety from its top safety issues.
“We certainly saw a change in enforcement posture over the last year at FMCSA — conducting a number of crackdowns, putting operators out of business,” Hersman said.
“This is an industry that is very wide-ranging, has very low barriers to entry with respect to conducting operations over the highways,” she said. “We believe some progress was made, but more needs to be done.”
But in an interview afterward, Hersman said that NTSB asked DOT to take “a bigger look” at FMCSA’s work.
“We did not feel that their targeting was as effective as it could be because we investigated multiple accidents where they or their state designees had been on the property recently,” she said.
