How many of you are happy with roadside safety inspections? I mean, the basic idea. I’m convinced that they don’t work anywhere near well enough to warrant the time and trouble. Worse yet, they play into the hands of ill-informed politicians and mean-spirited journalists who try to attract votes and readers respectively by picking on the big, easy targets we offer up — trucks and truckers. Those fools misrepresent the inspection numbers every year.

Last week, the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators and Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance released preliminary results from the annual RoadCheck safety blitz held June 4-6. In Canada, some 20 per cent of all vehicles checked were ordered out of service for one reason or another. It’s an improvement over recent years but still an uncomfortably high percentage. Whether many of them actually deserve to be run off the road, even briefly, is worth arguing about.

It’s not that the inspection standards are bad, but their application in a whole bunch of cases is plain ridiculous. Ontario is one of the worst. Let’s look at a couple of excerpts from the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance brake out-of-service standards, which have been proven to provide safe braking on loaded power units on high-gradient descents:

1. Overall brake serviceability: “A vehicle or combination vehicle is out-of-service if 20% or more of its brakes have one or more of the following defects…” (followed by a list of specific, exact, and measurable conditions).

2. Air-brake hoses: “Damage through outer reinforcing ply. Rubber-impregnated fabric is not reinforcing ply. Thermoplastic nylon may have braid reinforcement or color difference between cover and inner tube. Exposure of the second color warrants out-of-service judgment.”

In some jurisdictions, Ontario among them, roadside inspections routinely include wire-brushing every spring and frame bracket, and they just keep cleaning until they find something to class as a defect. Inspectors may also demand that 100% of a truck’s brakes be fully within limits, and they’ll put a unit out of service for a mere surface abrasion on an air line.

No responsible person will tolerate unsafe vehicles on our highways, but extra-tough rules like this are ridiculous. They may appease the anti-truck lobby groups and provide great copy for the newspaper and TV news by inflating out-of-service numbers, but they’re pointless in their real effect on safe trucking. It amounts to harassment, nothing more.

I’m even more concerned about the value of this blitz at large, and I’m sure there’s a better way than this police-oriented response to “crimes” that were probably committed days, weeks, or even months before.

Don’t misunderstand me. The CCMTA and CVSA are fine organizations. While we Canadians moan about the lack of uniform standards within our little collection of quasi-Balkan states, the CVSA in particular has succeeded in establishing a more or less universal safety-inspection regime across the entire continent. That’s a major accomplishment.

Perhaps more importantly, the CVSA has helped to focus the attention of trucking folks on safety. There have been other influences, for sure, all of which add up to truck-accident statistics that have shown a marked improvement in recent years. The fact that roadside-inspection out-of-service rates remain so high proves that there’s at best a very questionable relationship between mechanical defects and accidents.
In any case, the only way to get at the bad guys effectively is through a combination of rigorous facility audits, much higher fines, and education of the various people involved, and I don’t mean just drivers.

People, after all, cause many more accidents than trucks do.

A pair of economists at Northwestern University’s Transportation Center in Chicago, Leon Moses and Ian Savage, have been researching the economics of truck safety, and a couple of years back they offered some interesting support for my position. They said that the U.S. federal safety audit program, followed up by enforcement and education for about 2000 fleets a year, produces benefits (43% fewer accidents a year on average) that outweigh the costs by a four-to-one ratio.

On the other hand, some 1.5 million roadside inspections are done each year in the U.S., but the gain in terms of reduced accident numbers only barely registers. The benefit/cost ratio, given the most optimistic interpretation of “benefit,” is only 1.5 to one. And the costs could actually outstrip the benefits depending on assumptions made about the number of accidents avoided.

Moses and Savage argued, as I do, that the resources put toward the inspection effort should be aimed instead at facility audits.

Governments, all of them, keep telling us they’re trying to use the money they drain from our pockets more efficiently. Politicians are also mighty keen to climb on soapboxes and proclaim war on highway mayhem. So why emphasize roadside inspections to an increasing extent when there isn’t much bang for the buck?

Could it possibly be that it’s too hard to wrestle a photo opportunity out of the typical audit scene? I guess the image of a guy sitting at a desk poring over maintenance records and time sheets and toll receipts just isn’t very sexy.

Maybe it’s really a matter of political bang for the buck, and to hell with what works.