The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) recently held its annual Brake Safety Week, during which 12% of the 43,565 commercial motor vehicles (CMVs) inspected were removed from service for brake-related violations (CVSA Releases 2020 Brake Safety Week Results). The week-long inspection and enforcement event, which emphasized reducing brake-related accidents, led to the removal of more than 5,000 CMVs from American, Canadian, and Mexican roadways because of brake violations.
North American CMV inspectors use the CVSA’s Standard Out-of-Service Criteria to discover vehicle inspection violations that are serious enough that the vehicle needs to be prevented from traveling on roadways until the conditions causing the violations have been repaired. Vehicles with no out-of-service conditions receive a decal, valid for up to three months, indicating that it has passed a recent CVSA-certified inspection.
In addition to accumulating brake violation data, Brake Safety Week inspectors also captured data regarding the chafing of brake hoses. Inspectors discovered nearly 7,000 brake hose chafing violations, divided among five categories according to the level of severity, two of which require removal from service.
“Although many commercial motor vehicle enforcement agencies were forced to reduce services in the spring due to the pandemic, it was important that we resumed inspection and enforcement duties as soon as it was safe to do so,” said CVSA President John Samis. “With truck drivers designated ‘essential personnel’ by the government, we needed to ensure that the vehicles traversing our roadways were safe to support commercial drivers as they selflessly continued to work during such a difficult and challenging time.”
The CVSA is a nonprofit association of local, state, provincial, territorial, and federal safety officials and industry representatives whose mission is to improve CMV safety and uniformity throughout Canada, Mexico, and the United States. It is unfortunate that it requires inspections by a nonprofit organization such as this in order to force the very much for-profit trucking industry to remove dangerous vehicles from our roadways.
If left to their own devices, the trucking industry would still be using many thousands of CMVs that have been determined to be unsafe because of brake violations. As long as such a large percentage of active CMVs continue to fail these routine safety inspections, we will be a long way from ensuring the safety of American motorists.
If you or a loved one have been injured in an accident with a commercial motor vehicle, please contact Shamberg, Johnson & Bergman for a free consultation. We will only receive a fee in the event of a successful resolution of your case.