Every year the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance organizes the Roadcheck inspection blitz, one of the largest safety initiatives focused on truckers in the country. This year’s was from June 3rd through June 5th. By the end of the 72 hour event, 72,415 inspections had taken place.
The CVSA released the results of the 2014 Roadcheck blitz and they’re a mixed bag. Though the rate of vehicle out-of-service orders dropped from last year almost 2% to 18.7%, driver out-of-service rates increased slightly to 4.3%.
Mechanical issues with brakes made up 46.2% of all OOS orders on vehicles, by far the most common issue. For drivers place out of service, the most common cause was Hours of Service violations, amounting to 46.5% of driver OOS orders. Additionally, 13.7% of OOS orders came as a result of falsified logbooks.
Drug/alcohol use accounted for only 1.1% of all driver OOS orders, but that still comes out to almost 800 drivers who had to be taken off the road due to drug or alcohol impairment. This is an improvement from previous years, but is still shockingly high.
To see a summary of the Roadcheck findings from the CVSA click here.
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Source: cvsa, prweb, overdrive
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Ray says
The new Cascadia I’ve been given has those sealed brakes that are impossible to check on a pre-trip. I don’t like that … maybe it’s also impossible for DOT to inspect them.
Reycer says
Ray, I have a 2015 Cascadia. The brakes are absolutely able to be checked during a pretrip. I have no idea where you got this information, but it simply isn’t true.
Ray says
I get my info from my own experience. The Cascadia that I drive now is a 2014. It’s different from the others I’ve driven. I haven’t gotten on my back and wiggled underneath it, nor will I, but there’s no way to check them by lifting the hood.
Craig says
On my 2012 & 2013 Cascadias, they’re “checkable” only with some sort of little metal key that fits through a slot in the shield. No way to visually inspect the brakes pads and drums.
Doug says
The 72 hour blitz is a money grab. If they were serious about safety, this would be an every day, normal routine thing.
John says
Biggest issue I think has been the slack adjusters being out of spec. I doubt many even could manually adjust their brakes if they had too. Everyone just assumes they adjust themselves.
I think trailers especially are grossly ignored a lot in the maintenance department. Trucks get through far more often for other maintenance but trailers don’t. I know in my travels of late I have noticed far more breakdowns on the roads with heavy trucks. Driving through Texas last week he amount of tire debris was significant. Is it because of temps or just the speeds going up?
diem says
So you NEVER worked for a large carrier? Does that mean you will hire a driver right out of some CDL farm?
Road jungleman says
Yeah it might of been The 124°degree””Texas”” heat.
Don says
It’s always about some stupid government regulations written by do-nothing government employees who enjoy gold-plated retirements while drivers drown in red tape. It’s never been about “safety;” it’s always been about how much further the government will crawl up drivers butts to accomplish what “looks good.”