Derek Barrs Tightens the Screws on Regulations
Derek Barrs, Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), announced that he is taking steps to increase safety on the road in a way that was previously ignored by the agency: tackling self-certification of service providers.
Details
Longtime readers might remember our previous articles about Electronic Logging Devices (ELD) and our gripes with how the federal government’s handling of it leaves a lot to be desired. Before, anyone could self-certify and the FMCSA would not alert trucking companies of ELD removals. Later, they started notifying trucking companies when ELDs were placed out of service. Now the FMCSA wants to go one step beyond and start implementing a more difficult process to get certified, not just for ELDs but for other services such as training providers and medical offices.
“You wanna be an Entry Level Driver Training provider? You just sign up,” Barrs said in addressing the issue. “That’s pretty much it. There’s no oversight for that per se. If we have people operating schools in this country that are just pushing people through, it’s my job to make sure you’re out of business. We have no place for that.”
The direction is a radical departure from the Trump Administration’s first term and earlier section of his second. For those, the Administration adopted strong anti-regulatory measures, opting for a policy of two or ten regulations cut for every one added. Recent news of devastating truck crashes has caused the FMCSA to start singing a different tune.
Conclusion
The Trump Administration is attempting to walk a thin line between not regulating too much as to stifle economic growth while also keeping roads safe. A comparable example is the airline industry: it is highly regulated to the point of nausea, but it has a fatality rate of 0.003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. By comparison, the open road has 0.57 casualties per 100 million miles traveled, or a rate of roughly 190 times more. While the FMCSA is not going to start implementing mandated spiels every time someone boards a vehicle as what is done on airplanes, requiring higher standards of service providers is an easy way to lower the rate, perhaps to below 0.50.
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