From the article:
“The larger carriers with full safety staffs and supported by big trucking organizations have an advantage because they’re labor-intensive for FMCSA investigative staff,” Wilson says. “They’re time-consuming, and for the value of the amount of violations found and the amount of people FMCSA will have to put in place to do it, they become unfeasible. … It’s much more efficient to compile large numbers of interventions on smaller carriers that provide the numbers necessary to meet the standards of the budget offices.”
So for Diane and me as one-truck owner-operators, the good news is that Landstar, a large carrier, protects us from that kind of discrimination. Landstar has a very active safety department and they do not hesitate to push back with skilled people, through the DataQs challenge system, against a citation that may be questionable. But for the no-name, small-carriers out their, the story is different and discouraging.
The Landstar safety people are well qualified and well situated to challenge a questionable citation. At least one of them I know trains DOT officers on the regs. She is very well networked in the enforcement community and knows well how to make the case that a given citation and its effects on a driver's and Landstar's record should be undone.
There is something to the FMCSA drive to compile large numbers that the article reports. Last autumn, I was pulled in or pulled over three times in two weeks for Level 3 (driver only) inspections (passed all three). At the third one I asked the cop why I was getting pulled in so much. He told me that he pulled me in because of my 1.1 placards and suggested that the others were doing so because they need the money. "Need the money?" I asked. He went on to explain that the fiscal year ends on September 30 and to get FMCSA funding, state cops need to complete a certain amount of inspections by a certain date. He speculated that I was in states or areas where they were behind on the count.
CSA is a wonderful thing, isn't it? ... A system in which the safest drivers are penalized the most.
