Safety advocate launches attack on FMCSA, its leadership
The safety group said it hopes FMCSA can finally be turned into “an effective force for motor carrier safety under its new leadership, Congressional direction, oversight and guidance will continue to be needed in order to improve the performance of the agency.
By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff
8/23/2010
WASHINGTON — Safety advocacy leader Jacqueline Gillan several weeks ago launched what could easily be described as an all-out attack on the effectiveness of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and its past and present leadership.
Among other things, Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, in testimony before the Senate subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety and Security, alleges that the agency:
• Camouflaged the actual truck fatality rate by merging it with the much lower fatality rate for buses and motor coaches and further diluted the “very high large truck fatality rate” by measuring the combined rate not against 100 million truck vehicle miles traveled (VMT), but against the much more generous figure of all annual VMT for all vehicles, including motorcycles, and that
• During its first 10 years of existence has compiled a “poor track record that was at odds with its safety mission by exhibiting a stark failure of leadership and oversight of the motor carrier industry, an inability to issue effective safety regulations and an inadequate enforcement policy.”
While the advocacy group hopes that FMCSA can finally be turned into “an effective force for motor carrier safety under its new leadership, Congressional direction, oversight and guidance will continue to be needed in order to improve the performance of the agency.”
Gillan pointed to what she called several safety oversight issues.
Whether the above and the allegations below are just allegations or whether they are true (credible sources have told us the truck fatality rate measure allegation is true), what Gillan said in a public hearing is newsworthy because (1) she’s so far off target that the industry needs to know the the measures to which its critics will go to impact changes or (2) the agency in question needs to have an opportunity to respond.
Which is the very reason we’ve sat on this the content of this testimony for weeks on end (we first were prepared to report this in our June 1 issue).
We’ve repeatedly asked the agency’s lead spokesperson for a response, which has been promised several times, but was not forthcoming as of press time (one of the primary tenants of this newspaper is always allowing both sides of an issue to be heard).
And for what it’s worth, we don’t agree with Gillan’s assessment of the effectiveness of FMCSA leadership past and present (no one can argue with FMCSA’s passion for safety and the decline in large truck fatalities), but we do believe it’s her right to speak her peace.
In her testimony, Gillan criticized the agency for what she called:
• Failure to implement National Transportation Safety Board recommendations, including what she called “NTSB’s long-term frustration” with the Department of Transportation’s failure to require electronic on-board recorders for all trucks.
• Failure to monitor and ensure the adequacy of state motor carrier inspection programs. She cited a lack of public information on state truck and motor coach inspection programs.
• Issuance of a “weak and ineffective EOBR regulation which the agency itself admits will apply to less than 1 percent of motor carriers.” She said the rule had serious defects, among them the fact the EOBRs default to “on-duty not driving status” when a truck has been stationary for only five minutes. “This allows time during intermittent vehicle movement in traffic congestion or while waiting in loading dock lines, to be recorded as non-driving time,” Gillan said. “As a result it will extend the drivers’ shift beyond the maximum 11 consecutive hours allowed by the regulation.”
• Inadequate safeguards for FMCSA’s new entrant motor carrier program, which she said “lacked many important aspects of appropriate agency oversight of new truck and motor coach companies, especially the need to mandate an initial safety audit of new carriers before awarding them temporary operating authority and performance a compliance review at the end of the probationary period of temporary operating authority with an assigned safety rating.
• An imbalance in FMCSA’s approach to using its new enforcement metrics in CSA 2010, which she said would place excessive emphasis on driver as opposed to vehicle violations, and
