The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance held its Spring Workshop from April 1-4 in St. Louis, and a fair amount of truck safety information and regulatory news was communicated during the meeting. Both FMCSA and CVSA representatives in leadership positions made remarks at various sessions during the Workshop, and below are some of the more interesting and perhaps useful comments made.
On the news front, an FMCSA representative stated:
- Implementation of the Entry Level Driver Training rule is likely to be delayed–the rule has a scheduled compliance date of February 2020, but FMCSA is facing challenges related to standing up the training provider registry among other items
- The industry should expect fairly significant CSA-related changes in the future—a few small-scale Item Response Theory models have been tested thus far, and a larger full-scale IRT model should be finished and shared with the industry (for review, consideration and comment) by the end of 2019
- The industry should also expect FMCSA to implement a more robust Crash Preventability Program later this year—FMCSA will likely include more crash types in the program, and changes are coming to make the program easier for the industry to use and FMCSA to administer
Regarding the industry’s implementation of ELDs, a CVSA representative made the following comments:
- The use of the personal conveyance (PC) status in the industry is “completely out of control”—parts of the industry have pushed the “fraud and abuse” from paper logbooks into the PC status
- As a result of this observation, CVSA will be stepping up its ongoing effort to have FMCSA define by regulation a distance or time standard (or both) for PC