OTTAWA — The National Safety Code (NSC) standard for daily truck inspections, which are set to take affect this weekend, will have a tangible impact across the country, says the Canadian trucking Alliance.

Saskatchewan, which has already implemented the new standard, will require full compliance by all carriers on July 1, 2007. Ontario’s rules are to be rolled out the same day, but a period of educational enforcement will continue until the end of the year. The other provinces will follow suit in the coming months.

Those provinces which will not yet have the new rules in place have agreed to accept use of the updated standard, so that drivers will not need to comply with different rules when crossing provincial borders.

New trip inspection guidelines provide
more certainty for carriers and drivers: CTA

Despite this rather uneven start, carriers and drivers should see real benefits from the new regulations, CTA says. “Whereas the old requirements provided only vague guidance on exactly what is a defect and what a driver should do about it, the new approach allows drivers to conduct detailed inspections, and gives them specific vehicle defects to look for,” the group states.

The defect list tells a driver when a vehicle is safe to operate, or when it must be repaired before it can get on the road. Operations and maintenance staff will use the same criteria to determine vehicle status.

During the development of the standard, a pilot program was carried out and it included a survey designed to evaluate drivers’ knowledge of the existing rules. While most drivers felt they had a good understanding of the rules, only a minority were in fact able to decipher what the regulations required.

Carriers involved in the pilot found that operations and maintenance staff were also supportive of the new approach since it provides a standardized basis for all to work from.

CTA played a key role in the development of the new NSC standard.
“To a large extent it reflects industry views on the need for enforcement policy makers to reach decisions on the severity of defects in an objective manner and to communicate that information clearly to drivers and carriers,” it says. “The Alliance is optimistic that the industry will find the common-sense approach of the new standard both easier to comply with and of greater practical value.”

— for a closer look at the new rules check out the Related Stories links below.