Every year, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance conducts a 72-hour inspection spree on commercial trucks and buses in West Virginia and the rest of the U.S. The spree covers all of North America, in fact. It’s called the International Roadcheck, and it’s meant to ensure compliance with both driver- and vehicle-related safety guidelines.
The CVSA has announced that the 2018 International Roadcheck will take place from June 5 to June 7 and that the inspectors will be conducting the most thorough inspections possible on most rigs. These inspections, known as Level I inspections, will uncover any driver- or vehicle-related non-compliance.
Hours-of-service violations are a special focus this year because they were cited as the top reason, along with brake-related violations, for drivers being put out of service in last year’s event. The 2017 International Roadcheck saw 63,000 drivers inspected: an average of 15 per minute. Among them, 15,000 were issued out-of-service orders, with 12,000 of them for vehicle-related non-compliance alone.
Another reason why hours-of-service regulations are the focus is that the ELD mandate has entered its period of hard enforcement. In December 2017, the U.S. DoT instituted a regulation that all commercial truckers install electronic logging devices in their rigs. These devices prevent the falsification of duty hours.
Many truckers falsify their hours to hide the fact that they worked over the number of duty hours allotted to each day. Overworking to meet a deadline can lead a trucker to become fatigued, increasing the risk for a truck collision. Victims of such collisions can speak with a lawyer about filing a claim against the trucking company; the lawyer may be able to hire investigators to gather the police reports as well as any physical evidence at the crash scene to prove that the trucker was negligent. All negotiations may be handled by the lawyer.