You make a good point but here is the thing I am seeing and I got out of CSA training, the company will have to mitigate their risks in a more proactive manner than ever before, some of it has to do with insurance and their need to rid the risks. The insurance company may use this to actually force changes in some companies who have a higher than desired safety rating.
The company will have to decide if the DOT (with something like 1 LEO to ?? motorist) is sufficient enough to actually be counted on to police the behavior of the drivers in their fleet or if they have to step up efforts themselves to weed out the problems. Bad behavior being observed is different from being caught and I know you will agree with that but the fact remains that in large fleets (FedEx, Landstar, UPS and so on) the problem becomes one that internal proactive mitigation may be the best course of action instead of external reactive solutions.
I guess my point is, if the insurance company is going to use the new system to dictate to the carrier, then the carrier will use it because that's what they are being judged upon. Carriers will now have this system available to them as an additional way to monitor what the drivers are really behaving like, with this new source of information (a source that they have no choice but to pay attention to) they may be less inclined to listen to a report from a non professional, non enforcement individual as they have a new official source for the info. I think a company who acts on the public's phone calls now will be either less inclined to listen or behave the way they do now, as the CSA2010 information is going to come in and point out the bad apples faster and more accuarately that the present system does
True, but how many play by the rules right now? If we are talking about expediting, then there are time constraints and issues with dispatching through systems that force behaviors - in service time, acceptance rates, etc..
True enough, but, a carrier who encourages or demands this type of behavior is going to be faced with a dwindling driver supply and higher insurance rates. Both cost money and hurt profits.....tends to make the powers that be notice.
The one thing that a few of us were told is that many carriers will use the idea that they will end up paying or rewarding for this behavior which may not happen at all. In some cases, not to mention a specific carrier, their need to propagandize anything they require into a reward has its issues and that sometimes goes into playing a part in the bad behavior it is there to correct. I don't expect to see rewards like better rates for doing my job, do you?
I don't expect rewards for doing my job, however, if my carrier gives me one for being on time and taking runs etc and I have done so WITHOUT harming my personal CSA score then it shows I have better managed my time and business. Anyone stupid enough to aim for a carrier reward at the expense of their own personal record or safety should be off the road anyways. As far as rates go, do I expect CSA to push rates up.....maybe.....maybe eventually....but I do see it as slowing down the downward spiral rates have been in. My Detroit example, that guy has been flouting the rules for years and running auto freight cheap. His profits come from paying guys next to nothing, they in turn survive by running old junk and break any and all the rules, you know the group of companies I am speaking of, wouldn't it be great to get them off the roads?
I do agree with most of that, but I wouldn't count on 95%, I think maybe something like 65% will end up being the magic number because it does not address the underlying problems with safety - training - while it is addressing other issues that need to be addressed, the problem with large companies will continue. Even if someone never has been caught by the DOT, they may have bad habits of even dangerous behaviors that may be too late to address, like depth perception or awareness of their surroundings. I would think if this was going to be effective, then it would be in combination of tightening up training which forces the economical training mills to shut and to force testing at a level that is higher than it has ever been.
I think this will also cause a bigger supply of bad drivers on the market, but as you said it will take a few years to show results.
Like any government program it surely will take several years for it to achieve any real result. At first the industry will fight it. Then they will discover some loopholes in it. The loopholes will get closed. You will have over zealous enforcement and mis interpretation of the rules, this will have to be reigned in as well. But it attacks the problems from the most visible and best point to do it, you are going after the bad drivers, and as they disappear, the carriers that depend on rule breakers to make profits will go away as well. It will take time, there is no quick fix for any of this.
It is easy to id the smaller carriers who are problems, even put a number of those out of business that have abused the system to make a buck but the larger ones seem to be the problem on the road because of their fleet size and this gives them the tools that they should have had to rid themselves of undesirable drivers. You know and I know that companies, pumpkin one comes to mind, produce poor drivers in a lot of cases because of their training system is geared for throughput, not quality and because of their size of their fleet and need, it is hard not to put someone who is poor driver in control and have them act professional under most situations.
Exactly right! The large carriers are just as much a part of the problem as the small guys. While I think the large carrier eventually gets rid of the poor driver (eventually they cost more than they are worth) this system will hopefully purge the unqualified out at a faster rate. This will force the pumpkins etc. to improve the training they have to get the desired life expectancy out of the training investment. Bad drivers are everywhere, I want as many of them gone as possible, but what I really want to see is the companies that depend on the rule breakers to be profitable loose their driver pool
I have seen some pretty bad driving by company drivers from US express and Pumpkin. A US express driver took out two trucks backing into a dock with his trainer sitting there next to him. While a Pumpkin driver hit another truck while turning around to go back through the pumps and out the entrance. While i have recently seen this with a Panther T/T driver, exiting out of the entrance, I seem to see it more often than not by large company drivers.
I agree there are a lot of bad apples and of course you will remember more from the larger companies, the trucks are easily identifiable and someone like the pumpkin, if they have 1% idiots, they have more of them total than someone like Ted's Trucking. Ted might have 80 trucks but has 40 idiots. Right now, Ted has a 50 % idiot score and would be directly in the DOT's sights. But....the pumpkin......at 1% has over a THOUSAND idiots on the road. The current enforcement system goes after Ted and not the pumpkin....who is the bigger problem? By focusing the enforcement and scoring on THE DRIVER the pumpkin now becomes an enforcement target as well as poor old Ted, and the idiots get pulled off the road without being able to hide under the statistical largess of someone like the pumpkin. This alone, makes me believe the new system is a step in the right direction.
