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September 2022

Did You Receive an Insurance Cancellation Notice?

Chances are it is because you haven’t yet renewed your membership, a requirement to be insured through ICSA’s Risk Purchase Group. Even though the deadline is now past, you can stop the cancellation process by logging onto the ICSA website and following the prompts to renew.

For questions, send an email to contact@safecarriers.org or contact your account manager.

Celebrate Truck Driver Appreciation Week with ICSA

At ICSA, EVERY WEEK is Truck Driver Appreciation Week!

Coming to ICSA Members: New Monthly Regulatory Bulletin

This edition of The Landing Gear is loaded with important information and updates, and we urge you to click the READ MORE HERE buttons and read everything thoroughly. One of ICSA’s primary roles is to provide our members timely information on regulations, enforcement activity and other critical actions and trends in the context of what these issues mean for ICSA members.

Starting next month, ICSA will launch a monthly Regulatory Roundup, written by our newest contributor – Warren Hoemann – as well as our Director of Operations, Shawn Nelson. This will allow us to provide more in-depth reporting and analysis of pending regulations and regulatory updates.

Fatalities in Truck-involved Crashes Jumped 13% in 2021

ICSA Seeing Increases in Unsafe Truck Driver Behaviors

The end of the pandemic sent many motorists back to their commutes and sent traffic crashes and fatalities to the highest levels since 2005, says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). NHTSA’s preliminary review of 2021 traffic data estimates 42,915 people died in traffic crashes last year, a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020. The projection is the largest annual percentage increase in the history of the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS).

ICSA Safety Consultants, who review hundreds of members’ SmartDrive incident videos every week, say they are alarmed about increases in unsafe driving behavior by truck drivers, including following too closely, excess and unsafe speed for conditions, and a sharp increase in distracted driving. (See this month’s Coaching Corner below.)

NHTSA estimated the 13% increase in truck-involved fatalities resulted in 5,601 deaths. NHTSA defines a large truck as any truck with a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating of more than 10,000 pounds, either in commercial or non-commercial use at the time of the crash – a weight range that includes everything from heavy duty pickups to semis.

At the same time, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) reported that 2021 vehicle miles traveled (VMT) increased by about 325 billion miles, or about 11.2% compared to 2020. Yet the fatality rate for 2021 was 1.33 fatalities per 100 million VMT, down only marginally down from 1.34 fatalities per 100 million miles VMT in 2020.

Model Safety Plan Now Online for Members

Over the past several months, ICSA, largely through the efforts of its Lead Safety Consultant Mike Hitchcock, has been developing a Model Safety Plan (MSP) that any member may use and adapt at no cost. Members directly benefit from Mike’s more than three decades of safety management experience with “how-to’s” ranging from Establishing a Safety Culture to Driver Onboarding and Orientation to a baker’s dozen of other key knowledge areas.

The plan is FREE to current ICSA members. To access the Model Safety Plan, log in to www.safecarriers.org and click on the MSP logo on the member dashboard. And while you’re there, check out the FirstGear™ online driver training curriculum, also available at NO COST to members.

Roadcheck 2022 Results are In

Each year the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) conducts an all-out, 72-hour truck and truck driver inspection effort, called “Roadcheck,” with its Canadian and Mexican counterparts. This year, Roadcheck was held May 17-19.

Each year Roadcheck also brings a special focus on one truck system or another. In 2022, that focus was on “wheel ends” – tires, wheels and rims. Inspectors primarily conducted Level I (the 37-step check of the driver’s operating credentials and the vehicle’s mechanical and regulatory compliance) and Level V (vehicle only) inspections but paid closest attention to where “the rubber meets the road.” Wheel ends, after all, directly affect a truck’s traction, braking, stability and handling. In prior years, nearly one quarter of all vehicle out-of-service violations involved wheel ends.

The results from Roadcheck 2022 were much the same. Of this year’s top 10 vehicle out-of-service violations, tires came in second and wheels ranked seventh. Combined, wheel ends accounted for 22.8% of all vehicle out-of-service violations. Brakes were the number one vehicle out-of-service violation.

Level I and Level V inspections look at the entire truck, not just wheel ends. Roadcheck 2022 saw inspectors in the U.S., Canada and Mexico examine 37,705 commercial motor vehicles, placing 8,718 vehicles out of service, for a North American vehicle out-of-service rate of 23.1%. At the same time, U.S. and Canadian inspectors also conducted Level II (Walk Around Driver/Vehicle) and Level III (driver credential) inspections and placed 3,118 drivers out of service, with “false logs” being the leading violation.

View complete Roadcheck 2022 results >>

Here’s some good news: CVSA gives plenty of public notice of each year’s enforcement and inspection efforts dates and focus. In turn, ICSA publicizes these enforcement and inspection task force events well in advance so that there is plenty of time for members to look over their trucks in preparation for Roadcheck – or for Brake Safety Week or Operation Safe Driver Week – and get a clean bill of health from the inspectors. A clean inspection benefits your SAFER safety score with FMCSA.

COACHING CORNER

By Mike Hitchcock, ICSA Safety Consultant

Handling Inattention Among Drivers

As mentioned in the article on increased truck-involved fatal crashes, your ICSA safety consultants are seeing a huge increase in distracted/inattentive driving. We review hundreds of incident videos each week and, in way too many videos, the driver is talking on the phone, has the radio blaring or is going too fast in traffic and can’t process data fast enough to identify and react to sudden changes.

Despite all the new safety features and equipment in our trucks these days, crashes and fatalities continue to rise. We must do better, and ICSA’s safety consulting team is here to help members improve highway safety and reduce the chances of being in a serious crash.

DataQs and the Single-Truck Operator

Guest blog By Scot Montgomery, ICSA Board Member and Wyoming Highway Patrol Captain (ret.)

As the old saying goes, “The only dumb question is the one that goes unasked.” This analogy is easily applied to the DataQ process as “If inaccurate data is not reviewed, only the carrier suffers.” While large carriers have teams of safety specialists and intermediate carriers often have at least one dedicated safety director to perform Requests for Data Review (RDR, or DataQ for short), for single-truck owner/operators, this function, as with so many aspects of single-truck motor carriers, becomes the responsibility of that owner.

With Carrier safety scores at the tip of anyone’s fingers and the wide array of subjects affected by those scores, it becomes critically important for all motor carriers to do everything within their power to monitor their safety scores.

If you don’t have a DataQ account, Register for one now.

You can use the DataQ system to contest violations that occurred in the past two years and accidents dating back three years. An additional DataQ feature that some carriers don’t know about is the Crash Preventability Determination Program (CPDP), a process that reviews RDRs to reassess the preventability determination of crashes. Because this is a fairly recent feature of DataQs, only crashes that happened on or after August 1, 2019 may be considered in an RDR inquiry.

Before you read on, you may wish to link to Mr. Montgomery’s first blog on DataQs published in the January Landing Gear newsletter.