Canadian truckers who pine for a U.S.-style regulatory regime might want to drop a quick fan letter to the Office of Motor Carriers and Highway Safety in Washington, D.C., because the agency sure could use a morale boost. The embattled division of the Federal Highways Administration that oversees truck safety in the United States has been accused of being ineffective and too cozy with the industry it aims to regulate. Its management ranks have been swept clean and replacements parachuted in. There’s talk that the office should be folded into another federal safety agency, or razed altogether and a brand new body erected in its place.

And that’s just in the last six months.

But for once, the office seems to be finding its focus. While congressional committees continue to examine OMC’s mission, new managers have prepared a get-tough safety agenda in an effort to prove their worth. Released in April, the project list was an indication to truck operators that even though debate about OMC’s future goes on, the agency is proceeding with more focused, more frequent enforcement-performance-based, with an emphasis on technology to reduce crashes.

The agency will continue to encourage truckers to voluntarily obey the rules, new director Julie Cirillo says, but an enforcement crackdown is on the way, with inspectors able to levy fines of up to $10,000 US for some offences.

The kick that started this process was delivered by U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia. Wolf, chairman of the transportation appropriations panel in the House of Representatives, has his hands on OMC’s purse strings.

Wolf is adamant that there be change at the agency: when he looks at trucking, he sees deteriorating safety performance. DOT uses fatality rates to measure safety: the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. By that standard, trucking is much safer than it used to be. Since 1980, trucking miles have risen 77% and the fatality rate has gone down more than 9%.

This improvement can be attributed to a wide variety of efforts, such as better highway infrastructure; safer trucks and cars; the national commercial driver’s license; mandatory drug and alcohol testing; and more roadside inspections through the DOT’s Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program.

But recently the fatality rate has leveled out-since 1992, it has hovered between 2.5 and three fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled, with no marked improvement.

Worse, the number of fatalities has been creeping up from around 4500 in 1991 to 5355 in 1997. When Wolf looks at OMC, he sees an enforcement agency failing to do its job.

His solution: Move OMC out of the FHWA and into the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This proposal, which almost made the cut in last year’s highway legislation and which Wolf has reintroduced, set off alarms in the trucking industry. NHTSA is an engineering agency focused on vehicle design and safety, argued the American Trucking Associations among other lobbyists, an inappropriate place for managing operations issues.

Not coincidentally, the idea was greeted warmly by the safety advocacy community-and no more coolly than by leaders at OMC. Reluctant to move out of FHWA, OMC chief George Reagle and others on his staff asked trucking companies to lobby lawmakers on the agency’s behalf, which is illegal. In December, Reagle-accused by Wolf of being too close to those he was regulating-was reassigned in an advisory capacity. Meanwhile, Wolf renewed his call to move the OMC or replace it with a separate administration.

Many, if not most, of the truckers and trucking companies operating in America today are safe, he says, but when a truck is involved in an accident on the highway, regardless of who was at fault, the consequences are often deadly.

“Fifteen people die every day in crashes with heavy trucks-the equivalent of a major airline crash every two weeks,” Wolf asks. “Can you imagine how major a news story it would be if a plane crashed every two weeks?”

Indeed, trucking is not as safe as it could be-and that’s what is driving this reform campaign. These pressures are being channeled through a series of congressional hearings that began in January and continued through spring. Hearings have been held by two House panels-the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation-and investigations and negotiations also are under way.

It’s widely held that an audit of OMC by the Dept. of Transportation Inspector General Kenneth Mead will be key to the agency’s fate.

The way Mead sees it, OMC needs a lot of fixing. Its focus on fatality rates as a measurement of safety is flawed, he says, because it can allow the absolute number of fatalities to increase as the number of miles driven increases. It’s time to work on lowering both fatalities and the fatality rate, he explains.

Moreover, OMC’s collaborative approach to enforcement is a bust. Half of the agency’s staff rates its enforcement program as poor to fair, OMC is not aggressive enough with the enforcement tools at its disposal, and what data it has is incomplete and inaccurate, Mead says.

But the most important observation from the inspector general goes to how OMC is constituted. “The truck safety mission must be placed in an organization where it has strong leadership, a clearly defined mission aimed at safety, and management willing to make tough decisions-like issuing ‘shutdown’ orders when appropriate,” he says.

One possible reason the office has been ineffective is that it is part of FHWA, whose main focus is on highway funding and design.

Several industry groups want trucking to have its own administration within DOT. ATA president Walter McCormick points out that trucking is by far the largest mode of freight transportation, yet it does not have an equal place at the DOT table with aviation, railroads, and maritime.

After all, he argues, there is a Federal Aviation Administration, a Federal Railroad Administration, even a Federal Maritime Administration-yet these industries are far smaller in terms of revenue generated than trucking.

“The trucking industry and the motoring public deserve a federal agency that has trucking and truck safety as its core mission,” McCormick says.

In an interview after a hearing in April, Mead seemed to agree, but stressed that such an administration should focus DOT resources on improving truck and bus safety-and that it should be shielded from industry influence.

Whether or not trucking gets its own administration, most agree that OMC’s location on a DOT org-chart is less important than a well-defined mission and decisive leadership. While the office has taken its licks in Washington, it’s now taking a few swings of its own. The agenda Cirillo and her team put forth in April portends a serious safety crackdown. For example:

o The single greatest deficiency in the motor carrier safety enforcement program today is the lack of data about accidents. Wolf hopes to fund a truck-accident study recommended by the American Automobile Association that would have the National Academy of Sciences investigate truck crashes in detail in order to build the kind of database that led to the safety features that are common on cars today. Meantime, OMC will refine its SafeStat system for identifying high-risk companies, develop uniform enforcement policies in each state, increase the number of compliance reviews, and find new ways to identify unsafe operations-including using reports from drivers. It wants to plug states and carriers into an integrated national carrier-safety information network by 2003.Cirillo wants a 200% increase in the number of in-depth safety reviews, up to an average of four to five high-quality reviews per inspector per month.

o The agency wants new hours-of-service rules issued by next year, with continued research on driver fatigue, work-rest cycles, and crash rates by time-of-day. The agency also called for research on scheduling practices, local-driver fatigue, sleeper berths, and the role of shipper demands in fatigue by 2001.

o Make international safety regulations more compatible by helping Mexico to develop and publish minimum standards, including hours of service rules and log books, while beefing up enforcement of Mexican carriers.

o Raise the cost of breaking federal safety rules. In an agency memorandum, Cirillo told the agency’s field staff to start levying heavier fines starting April 26.

Field staff have the authority to choose the level of a fine, based on the nature, circumstances and gravity of the offense, as well as prior offenses and ability to pay.

The purpose of the fines, Cirillo said in the memo, is “to induce carriers to comply with safety regulations by making it financially unacceptable to ignore them.” Under the new guidelines, the agency can charge a company up to $10,000 for each individual violation that caused or could lead to serious injury or death.

Hazardous materials carriers that violate a 45-day out of service order also are liable to a $10,000 fine. The minimum fine for these violations is $3000. Fines for less serious violations begin at $750 and are capped at $3000.

Recordkeeping violations are capped at $500 per offense-but an additional $500 can be applied for each day the violation continues, up to $5000. A $5000 penalty can be applied if the recordkeeping violation conceals a more serious violation. The minimum recordkeeping fine is $300. Carrier employees are limited to a maximum of $2500 for each violation. For carriers with gross annual revenues of $18.5 million US or less, the fines can be lowered if the violations are not willful or there are other, similar reasons.

There’s truth to the saying that money talks. And the higher fines speak Cirillo’s message loud and clear: a safety crackdown is coming on full-throttle ahead if it’s not already here. And if truckers aren’t ready with rigs and drivers that are up to snuff, then they should be prepared to pay the price.