ST. LOUIS — The new presidential administration in Washington will take a closer look at the impacts of transportation regulations on business, said Jack Van Steenburg, chief safety officer and assistant administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, during his annual presentation to Motorcoach Expo.
“We have a new secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, who has come in and talked to us. She has given us her thee priorities,” Van Steenburg said during the State Association Summit at Expo.
“The first one is safety. She wants safe roads and safe transportation but she doesn’t want to impact commerce. The next thing is budget — the president has an infrastructure plan and she wants to focus on stewardship of public funding. The third priority is innovation and technology,” he said.
Van Steenburg offered details on the commercial passenger industry programs on the table at FMCSA. The FMCSA regulation requiring electronic logging devices on all motorcoaches is still on schedule to take effect on December 18, he stressed. (See related story on Page 20.)
As for the controversial bus lease/interchange rule, its compliance date was extended last year to Jan. 1, 2018, after issuance of the final rule created a furor among industry leaders.
They said the regulations would place insurmountable obstacles between carriers that need to share equipment and drivers to handle short-term trip demands.
“We heard you loud and clear,” Van Steenburg said, noting that UMA President and CEO Victor Parra and Vice President Ken Presley recently visited an FMCSA staff meeting.
“Quite frankly, they gave us an earful,” Van Steenburg said.
The rule’s objectives are identifying the motor carrier responsible for safety and regulatory compliance, ensuring a lessor surrenders control of the vehicle for the full term of the lease or exchange and ensuring unsafe passenger carriers cannot evade FMCSA oversight and enforcement by operating under the authority of another carrier that exercises no actual control over those operations.
The administration is considering ways to accommodate the industry’s concerns, Van Steenburg said.
“We want to make sure the buses are safe. We are on top of it. Hopefully we can resolve this sooner than later.”
He said a speed limiter mandate for trucks and buses probably is a ways off.
“That is going to be a little while,” Van Steenburg said. “I know the new administration wants to take a hard look at that one. We had 5,000 comments on the speed limiter rule. I took a look at state speed limits — the vast majority of states how have speed limits of 70 miles an hour. There are eleven states with limits over 70. I think Texas has 80 or 85 in some areas.”
About 900 vehicles and 24 sites in southeastern states are part of an evaluation of wireless roadside inspections, Van Steenburg said.
“We have a pilot program using wireless technology to look at operating authority, registration, insurance, hours of service. Does the driver have a CDL, a medical certificate and the right endorsement?” he said.
“For the industry, what is the benefit? We are leading toward some type of credit the industry would get in the ‘beyond compliance’ program we are working on if they participate in the wireless roadside inspection program.”
The administration is awaiting recommendations before proceeding with new methodologies for creating carrier Safety Fitness Determinations, Van Steenburg said.
According to the notice of proposed rulemaking, this effort is “designed to enhance the agency’s ability to identify non-compliant motor carriers (and) would update FMCSA’s safety fitness rating methodology by integrating on-road safety data from inspections, along with the results of carrier investigations and crash reports, to determine a motor carrier’s overall safety fitness on a monthly basis.”
“We have been asked (by UMA and other industry groups) to withdraw the notice of proposed rulemaking, but I have been saying all along we are not going to mount a rulemaking until we get the correlation study back from the National Academies of Science,” . Van Steenburg said.
“We don’t know what is going to be in that study. We believe they are going to make recommendations. The law says we have to do a corrective action plan.”
FMCSA plans to launch a two-year pilot program in May to determine how crashes may be classified.
“We are looking at impaired driving, wrong-way driving, striking a commercial motor vehicle in the rear, striking a CMV while it is legally stopped, animal collisions and infrastructure,” Van Steenburg said. “The decisions would be identifying the crash as preventable, non-preventable or undecided, then we will address it on the Safety Measurement System website.
“Right now all crashes are in there. We are still going to capture all crashes, but then we are going to put in whether this crash was deemed non-preventable by FMCSA. We feel like this is the right thing to do. I think it is long overdue.”
FMCSA is working on another mandate to create methodology for adding a “Beyond Compliance” category to the safety ratings of carriers that exceed regulatory requirements.
“This one is huge,” Van Steenburg said. “The plan is to create an eighth BASIC in the Safety Measurement System. We are looking for proven technology that can show safety results and show that you go beyond the norms. There has to be some way to manage it and validate it.
“We are going to contract out with somebody to manage the program. We have to have a plan to take back to Congress. It’s gonna be a little while.”
Congress also has required FMCSA to take a closer look at the safety ratings of curbside carriers, he said.
“We did an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking. The hardest thing is, how do we define those carriers? We came up with a definition that uses 25 percent of operations are curbside, city to city, and drop-off at a non-traditional place like a sidewalk or storefront. We are still working on that one. It is not imminent that we are going to be doing that one.”
The administration is making progress on its mandate to conduct compliance reviews on motorcoach carriers every three years, Van Steenburg said.
“In 2016 we did about 1,100 compliance reviews. We did about 800 and the states did about 300. There are around 2,900 motorcoach companies. If we keep doing 1,000 a year we should be in line to meet that every-three-year mandate.”
New entrants
New entrants are another priority, Van Steenburg said.
“We have to screen new motorcoach carriers within 120 days. We are about 98-percent timely. There are always reasons why we can’t get to some of them in the 120 days.”
Regulators are beginning to consider the future of automated commercial vehicles. Van Steenburg said he has not heard of any plans for self-driving commercial passenger vehicles but continuing driver shortages could create interest in the technology.
“Our regulations were made with the assumption that there is a driver in the seat behind the wheel,” he said. “We are coming out with a Federal Register notice to ask for comments on automated vehicles and what the driving part of that would be.”
Van Steenburg said he is proud of the motorcoach industry’s recent safety record.
“We have been doing great. I say ‘we’ because I feel like I am part of your record,” he said, but cautioned, “One crash can really put more scrutiny on us as an industry and as regulators. Managing risk is what we have to do every single day.”
Finally, he wanted to clear up perceptions about inspector’s having quotas for writing violations.
“People think that if we send an investigator, they have to find something wrong. They don’t have to find a violation, I am telling you. I don’t want violations written to write violations. They don’t get any more money for writing violations.”
