Dispatcher tries to force driver to drive tired. *MUST SEE*

[QUOTE="Hang - Man";3880322]Thats the K&B hammer down so they dont have to call in to tell them the load will be late:smt043I cracked myself up.
Well if anything, Abe will be pretty famous out on the road.[/QUOTE]
Thing is; the guy parked and headed inside.

 

A non-commit basically means there will be issues if you take this load. The company I'm with you can non-commit, but you better have valid reasons for doing so. I've only had to once and it was because I didn't have the available hours to run the load. They confirmed it with me via phone and a new plan was dispatched.

 

They are not good. Taken on the whole they are bad and it is easy to construct what is happening at the company.

Drivers should note the DOT specs. when looking a working for a company. I have found them to be spot on. If anything they underestimate the situation a company. As any experienced driver knows, there is a lot that can be hidden from the DOT. K&B hires experienced drivers and it shows at 17.2%. They just have to work too hard to keep there butt out of the fire and hide K&B's real faults. It all shows.

 

You realize that it's a percentile rank in a cohort group. So 50% is average. The comments that follow are speculation.

 

Really? Now we are going to make excuses for the trucking company??

What's next?
Oh, "that accident only killed 3 people, so we shouldn't punish anyone" ???

 

Show me the excuse I made.

 

I do not believe he is making any excuses. I think he is making an observation on the overall issue.

 

I agree with this post completely!


This is MY OBSERVATION.
Their CSA numbers only reflect the number of times they were CAUGHT IN VIOLATION!

For every time they were caught, they probably got away with it 50-100 times!!!
Let's stop being disingenuous.

 

No speculation follow along.

They hire only experienced drivers - fact. Experienced drivers know how to keep away from traffic tickets and accidents - hence 17.2%

Experienced drivers know how to write a good log sheet. However, you can only do so much with what you got for planning. You can only fudge stuff so much without getting caught and that becomes harder when your tired. If this was not the case the HOS stat would look just as good as the Driving stat. Thus 52.4% much worse.

55.3% of driver fitness tells me you have a hard time finding qualified drivers. The only excuse for that is you treat drivers like crap. That should be obvious. You turn over drivers and do little to check out new drivers. Any long term driver know to have your license/medical card in order.

80% is a lot of drug abuse and moves them right into the DOT's cross-hairs. I would not work for a company with this stat. It is just a invitation for a DOT inspection at each chance. Something has to be happening to cause this. How far off is the manager's insistance to get some coffee and carry on from taking any other drug to solve this fatal situation. These are experienced drivers that know the consequences.

51.5% maintenance is just bad. Look at the DOT website and see all the tickets. So what if it takes a lot of tickets to reach the 51.5% mark for a 600 truck carrier. It is bad, and just indicative of lack of concern for anyone else on the road let alone the driver. Experienced drivers know to get truck problems solved before it costs them; office staff is responsible for ignoring the requests.

It is easy to conclude if it wasn't for the office management, K&B's stats would look as good as the experienced drivers make the Driving stat. look. Furthermore, taken on the whole it is easy to conclude the same push from the office that makes HOS, driver fitness, drug abuse, and maintenance bad also resulted in the driving stat. worse than it would look otherwise. Problem is in the office. Abe's video shows the same.

The reason the DOT published the information in the way they did is so someone can read the stats and interpret what the problem is in a company. In this, it certainly appears the office is the problem

 

I'll expand on this, with an even more unpopular position. So put your pitchforks and torches away a minute and really see what you get with that CSA report.

One could just as easily pin a big chunk of these violation points on driver shortcomings. Poor or no pre/post trip, failing to have credentials on hand, drinking/drugs, poor logbook maintenance. Perspective matters.

What Meltom is saying bears repeating. The individual scores tell less of a story than ones that stick out. Places where their scores substantially depart from normal. Like controlled substances and alcohol. What's interesting is the makeup of those statistics. How many inspections? How many of those have violations? For what? It all matters, and without it you can't draw any conclusions. Here's mine:

That said, 602 trucks with 1,385 inspections in 2 years. So roughly one per truck per year. Figure optimistically each truck is in service 300 days a year and you have a snapshot of what is happening 1/300th of the days each truck is running. That doesn't tell you much of anything, but wait. There's more.

Unsafe driving. Well you usually only get one of these when you're caught doing whatever it is. What's not reported is how many of these traffic stops get extended into full driver and/or vehicle inspections. K&B gets about 130 of these a month. So about a quarter of the fleet is getting stopped each month at least once. That could lead to all sorts of violations depending on how the traffic stop goes. Trending down for the past 6 mos.

Equipment violations. They're running about 1,400 inspections a month, about 100 of which include violations. So the equipment is getting inspected about twice a month for each truck, with less than 10% having some kind of problem. Ranging all the way from flat tires down to reflective tape. Trending down for the past 6 mos.

Driver fitness (credentials). Really depends on whether you think a professional driver should own this, or if it's up to the carrier to babysit. Nonetheless, these are discovered during the 1,400 equipment inspections. Let the blame fall where it feels good. Their violation rate is about 1% with an even trend.

Drugs/alcohol. Four violations in two years. Again, it really depends on whether you think a professional driver should own this, or if it's up to the carrier to babysit. In a fleet of 602, these are clearly the bad apples. Not sure how you can fix this other than more frequent randoms. Gotta be careful though, very specific targeting criteria for any testing that is not random.

Vehicle maintenance. About 600 a month, 1/3 with violations, and about two violations each time. Personally I feel this is mutually owned. Carrier needs to supply adequate service, drivers need to do their pre/post trips and stand their ground on safety. This statistic is trending down slightly, so a tiny improvement. In general, they are getting fewer inspections with the same percentage of those getting violations.

One hazmat violation for wrong placard. Not worth commenting really. Whoops.

Crash statistic is meaningless without details on each one. Looks like roughly 3 "crashes" a month. That could be anything from a 4 wheeler rear-ending a stopped truck to one of their trucks rolling down a hill with no brakes into a school bus with multiple fatalities. Without details this doesn't tell anything.

So what? This CSA report tells me they have their work cut out. They. Both the carrier and their drivers.

If I were their safety director, I'd do two things right away:

1. Review dispatch process and driver escalation paths (HOS and equipment). Find and solve the problems before they get caught at the coops, roadside violation, or at the scene of the crash.
2. Implement an aggressive carrot and stick for unsafe driving. That's 140 roadside inspections under hostile circumstances that can be avoided.

You guys think it's easy for a carrier to keep a zero CSA score. For a one truck, operator driver, yes that is achievable. Hired drivers don't own their trucks and never care for them as much. Some can and do come close, but they are rare. And even the best guy has a bad day now and then. So hire you some drivers, put them out there and see how it works out. I had only two hired drivers. It's like herding cats. I can't imagine having to do that job for 600 drivers.

What I see here with K&B is not unlike any other large carrier. Likely symptomatic of typical big company lack of accountability, and not all in one area.