March 25, 2015 Vol. 12 No. 6

We have to talk brakes again, I think. The last time wasn’t long ago — my January 28th newsletter to be precise — but that was just to report on the lousy results from last fall’s Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) Brake Safety Week inspection blitz. In every category there was a significant increase in adjustment issues or out-of-service (OOS) rates year over year.

“It’s not that we’re getting worse; it’s that we’re not getting better,” I wrote at the time.

So a quick review of the latest numbers…

Of the 13,305 vehicles inspected throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico, 2162 of them were put out of service for brake violations. The OOS rate for all brake-related violations in North America was 16.2%, compared with 13.5% in 2013.

The OOS rate for brake adjustment rose to 10.4 from 9.0% in 2013.

And for brake components it was 9.3%, up from 7.1 in 2013.

Now it has to be said that we do better in Canada than they do in the U.S. The CVSA noted this, pointing out that OOS rates for brake-adjustment violations were 10.8% in the U.S. versus just 4.6% in Canada. In terms of brake-component violations the U.S. rate was 9.5% but only 6.8% in Canada. For total brake violations the OOS rate was 16.6% in the U.S. against 11.0% in Canada. Big differences.

Very big, but an overall OOS rate of 11.0% still strikes me as too high, no matter what you may think of the inspection process and the somewhat arbitrary way that trucks are forced off the road.

THAT NEWSLETTER PROMPTED A CALL from Andy Malion, president of Spectra Products, a Toronto-based designer and manufacturer of stroke indicator Brake Safe, in-cab monitor Brake Inspector, and the recently introduced Arrow Logger that works to make a pre-trip brake inspection a much easier, one-person job — you don’t need to maintain the foot-pedal application using a pedal depressor or a second person.