FMCSA offering 'kinder, gentler' approach to safety scoring? Not if automated inspections go live

In today’s early special edition of Overdrive Radio for podcast subscribers, another installment in the Trucking’s State of Surveillance multipart series: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15541635

If you missed Long Haul Paul Marhoefer’s talk with Karen Levy in the previous edition of the podcast, track back to it -- it dropped Friday, July 7, to the Overdrive Radio feed. Levy’s "Data Driven" book, about how the ELD mandate changed the face of trucking in so many ways (magnified longstanding issues in others), really sets the stage for this talk with attorney Hank Seaton: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15541633

The final piece of the State of Surveillance special reports, too, is particularly germane. It's the story about the rather slow, though quickening, moves toward automation of roadside inspections: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15541828

This long talk with Nashville-headquartered transportation attorney Seaton connects some dots in his thinking about the roadside and investigatory enforcement programs of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration -- likewise its safety rating program. Several related advance notices of rulemaking lead him to a feeling that agency could be moving toward a new rating regime that relies heavily on motor carrier data and could, in some ways, just reinforce current issues for independent owner-operators and other very-small fleets.

The first that caught Hank Seaton’s eye: those proposed CSA Safety Measurement System changes put up for review early this year, which many felt offered a bit of a "kinder, gentler" approach with CSA SMS, in Seaton's words, with more of the smallest fleets likely to fly under the radar of the SMS's scoring metrics. Yet if automated inspections become a compulsory part of truckers' travels past scale houses and/or other mobile checkpoints nationwide, voluminous inspection/violation data collected could mean quite the opposite of "kinder" and "gentler."

Find full results of our State of Surveillance survey of Overdrive's owner-operator readers via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/home/document/15541779/state-of-surveillance