Time for FMCSA to Stop Treating the Symptoms of the Safety Problem and Start Treating the Underlying Cause...

DISCLAIMER (hope you approve of this one, @FTC): If you are a mega carrier executive or with the ATA, you might want to skip this article (I don’t want to be responsible for any heart attacks)… 

Now, I'm not a doctor, but I've been around the block a few times. This September 23rd marks my 25th anniversary of working in the transportation industry. If I have learned anything, it's this: when you pay drivers by the mile and govern them by the clock, you are asking for safety problems. You've heard that oil and water don't mix, right? Well, neither do Hours of Service regulations and the pay-by-the-mile driver compensation model. It’s time we put all the cards on the table. I suggest that it’s high time for FMCSA to finally treat the underlying causes of the motor carrier safety problem, rather than the mere symptoms of the problem.

Let’s face it, ELDs were implemented because the government believed too many truckers were cheating or making “mistakes” on their paper logs. But cheating on logs was not really the problem. It is a symptom of the problem. The problem is this: there are economic incentives in place that make a driver want to drive longer against the HOS rules so he can make more money… because he is paid by the mile.

Now, the government is not ready to admit it yet (no worries, we’re going to help them see the light), but all ELDs have done is cause drivers to speed (in an SBTC online poll issued today, 100% (July 10th update: 90.2%) of immediate respondents said they were now speeding or observed an increase in other drivers speeding since ELDs went into effect-- Holy "Killing Spree," NTTC! @TankTruckAssoc).

You know those 26 lives per year ELDs were allegedly going to save? Well, you can fuhgettaboutit, as we used to say in New York, where I grew up. Those lives, and then some, are likely to be wiped out from drivers speeding trying to defeat regulation. Just you wait for the highway fatality rate figures for 2018 to come out sometime around December 2019. You’ll see… and I will say I told you so. I will say all FMCSA has done is swap one cause of death out for another, under the guise of protecting the public. Even if they were right on their speculation over the life-saving benefits of ELDs and they addressed the driver fatigue problem, they will not have addressed the latest symptom: driver recklessness. Or, the underlying problem.

Of course, the government will cough up an answer to that as well: speed limiters. Industry will argue that they are unsafe because they prevent the driver from needing to speed up momentarily in a life-threatening situation to avoid a disaster. Government won’t listen because they know best, and eventually when President Trump lifts the current ban on new regulations --or there no longer is a President Trump, Speed limiters will be the next prescription Dr. FMCSA will doll out (And after that, after the next wave of driver exodus, watch for the the road rage stats to go up when angry, underpaid Drivers who are left feel further squeezed). 

But speeding is not the problem either. It is yet another symptom of the problem. Once again, the problem is that there are economic incentives in place that make a driver want to drive longer so she can make more money… because she is paid by the mile.

But what if, rather than address the symptoms, we dug deep enough and found the root cause. We don’t need a CAT scan or MRI to conclude there is a tumor in the industry. It’s quite obvious and is protruding in all the statistics. Just look at the highway accident data, the driver turn-over rates, the alleged "driver shortage," and the temporary rise in freight rates due to the capacity crunch. Clearly, there is a mismatch in logic when you pay drivers by the mile and govern them by the clock. Everyone knows this, yet we have ignored the tumor for decades… and one day we will wonder why it became malignant. I don’t know what stage this cancer is in, but somebody needs to cut it out and quick, already, before the continuous chemo treatments poison the whole industry and we lose the patient (and the economy with it, Mr. @POTUS) outright.

 Now, I am all for Capitalism. I myself am an entrepreneur. And I usually point to laissez-faire as the guiding principle. But the former state motor carrier investigator and father in me, tells me we need to make the roads safe for the public. And if we are really going to do that, then there is only one way… to get inside the hearts and minds of drivers and give them some peace of mind. I don’t know whether the answer is to pay drivers by the hour as some suggest, because I appreciate the concern over productivity, but perhaps if there were a minimum salary (much like how we have minimum wage laws for the rest of America’s workers) combined with a bonus structure, we could better reconcile safety with productivity. If you are going to change the hearts and minds of drivers, you have to make safety congruent with their financial needs.

With many drivers making the same as what they made in the 1980’s --30 years ago-- there is something very wrong here. The Dept. of Labor Inflation Calculator shows that $50,000 in 1988 is equal to $153,000 in today’s money. And while there are always going to be greedy people in the world, and that includes drivers willing to sacrifice safety for money, I contend government and industry have an obligation to make sure drivers’ decisions are not grounded in downright avoidance of starvation. If you don’t want to do this in the name of goodness, fairness and human decency, FMCSA, do it in the name of your beloved public safety. But just do it already if the industry won't doctor itself back into good health. You can do it in a report to Congress.

A few years back, I suggested that there was a Big Business-Government-Safety Zealot nexus.  In fact, I had even gone as far as to publicly suggest here on LinkedIn that the FMCSA had been “captured” by a Big-Business-Safety Advocate Complex

Within days of putting that article out, the FMCSA went to the FTC and asked them to make a civil case against me and my now 17 year old private business to shut me up as a trade group president. Guess I struck a nerve. Well, they failed. I’m still here, and I’m still talking common sense...

So, FMCSA… if you really want to fix the safety problem, then why don’t you address with Big Trucking the underlying cause already, which is simply a matter of economics (#ItsTheEconomyStupid).

If you won’t because you are captured by Big Business as I previously suggested, maybe Congress will. The Small Business in Transportation Coalition (SBTC) will be sure to ask them.

JAMES P. LAMB, SBTC President