Thousands of trucks were pulled off the road as part of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s Brake Safety Week. Of the vehicles inspected, 13.5% were put out of service for “critical brake violations.”
Every year, the CVSA runs their Brake Safety Week. It’s a week-long enforcement and education blitz, but unlike other nationwide efforts, it’s focused on one specific aspect of truck safety: Brakes.
This year, Brake Safety Week ran from September 15th-21st. During that time, inspectors conducted 34,320 inspections of CMVs. 4,626 trucks were placed out of service for brake violations. That number does not include trucks placed out of service for other issues enforcement personnel discovered during the inspection.
The most common brake violations by far were chafed rubber hose violations (2,704 trucks) and kinked thermoplastic hoses (1,683 trucks). So much so that the CVSA didn’t bother reporting number amounts for other violations.
While a 13.5% OOS rate may seem high, it’s actually an improvement from last year when it was up above 14%.
“This inspection and enforcement event reminds drivers and motor carriers of the importance of properly functioning brakes and spotlights the work done by inspectors, motor carriers and drivers every day to keep our roadways safe by ensuring vehicles are in appropriate working condition,” said CVSA President John Samis.
Source: overdrive, ttnews, freightwaves
Self adjusting brakes that don’t self adjust.
Oh yeah. Automatic slack adjusters are a complete and utter useless invention. They stop working after you’ve already finished and passed a legitimate daily inspection and you confidently cruise into the inspection station with no idea there’s a problem. The same goes for chaffing brake lines. If they’re not in contact or chaffed when I set off, what am I supposed to do about it over the road between stops? NOTHING. It’s a crapshoot.
I gave up on that garbage. I grease my ASAs and just manually adjust the brakes when they’re out of adjustment or within a few millimeters of maximum push rod stroke; if the ASAs won’t adjust manually at all, that’s when I go home and have them replaced.
It’s sad to know that there are foolproof methods to prevent brakes from ever being out of adjustment, but they’re more concerned over costing the industry money for proper systems so they can continue to put money in their own pockets for violations.
Frankly, any time you see an inspection station, you can be sure there are people with jobs that intend to keep food on the table by @#$!ing everyone in the @$$. I have a clean record and will keep it that way – because I’m a professional driver – but also out of spite. 😉
Reading these annual reports of trucks-in-violation of safety standards always stirs the unanswered question: if 34,000 cars & light trucks were stopped at random for safety inspections, what percentage would be placed out of service for brake deficiencies? Cracked & obstructed windshields? Leaking fluids? Deficient tires? Front end & steering violations? Etc.
Probably significantly more though to be fair we would need to pull in and inspect about a million cars to inspect the same percentage of cars as they are doing trucks. And besides they mostly just wave past newer looking trucks and focus on trucks they think they can oos which skews the numbers only been inspected once in 10+ years driving when i was driving something under 5 years old, yet it was nearly weekly when i was in an older well maintained truck.
Sounds like a lot of poorly maintained air lines. Those “thermoplastic” connections to the trailer aren’t good through a winter. They say if you kink the line and it turns white, it’s no good and needs replaced.
But plastic does that anyway so… Yeah.
Thing about truck brakes, is in the event of a brake failure, the design of the air brakes will usually stop the truck. Contrast that to cars, where a brake failure usually means no brakes. So in theory, cars are much more dangerous.
It’s government, so it’s about MONEY. They don’t care about anything that’s not taxing and stealing money from those actually earning it.
They only care to make money from violations and save money when someone sues the city, state or province for being injured on their property.
If they cared about safety, they would ban systems that allow for absurd defects. For the last 30-years they’ve had a $2 sensor that lights up a telltale on your instrument cluster telling you that your brakes are out of adjustment and they just don’t care – they want you to fail an inspection so they can suck money out of a person and company making money. And that’s after you’ve already paid tax on it.
The problem in the industry is lazy and stupid drivers not doing their job that allowed the government to use it as a means of taking more money from us. I say, “don’t let them”. If drivers were doing the right thing, they would have to close down inspection stations because the issue wouldn’t be prevalent enough to warrant it and they would lose money. That’s why they scrapped emissions testing here – they took well over 20-million dollars in net profit from us, even though it was “non-profit”, regardless of whether or not our vehicles were polluting and then closed it down without giving us our money back. It’s just legal theft.
It’s not about safety, people. It’s about revenue for the state. Nothing more, nothing less.