For new-entrant carriers, there has been FMCSA collected data showing an increase in crash rates. This data involves large trucks belonging to trucking companies that got their start after 2018.
Dan Burrill, an FMCSA statistician, presented the agency’s data at their annual Analysis, Research, and Technology Forum in April.
The main presentation focused on the increase the trucking industry has seen in common-carrier registrations since the pandemic began in early 2020. In 2021, the FMCSA reported new registrations for motor carrier authorities averaging around 17,000 a month. Pre-pandemic, in 2019, the monthly average registration count was about 8,500. Most of these registrations are new entrants.
While the main presentation focused on the influx in registrations, the FMCSA included the crash statistics with these reports, since a majority of the newly registered are affected.
In the presentation, Burrill said, “we found that there’s a general tendency among the new carriers to be in a small number of crashes in their first year of operation, and then for the number of crashes to increase over time.”
To put things in perspective, the crash rate for new entrants in 2018 was 1.3% of all crashes involving large trucks or buses.
In 2021, the crash rate was coming in at 3.5%.
Burrill also stated, “A lot will be assessing new carriers and comparing them to a more well-established group to see if there are differences in safety performance,” when speaking about further analytical plans.
Also during the forum were presentations on Level 8 commercial vehicle inspections. FMCSA Transportation Specialist spoke on these stating “The vision for the Level 8 inspections is that they collect more data about the carrier, vehicle, and driver, including CDL status, hours-of-service compliance information, which is electronically checked against national compliance databases in real-time.” He explained that the information collected is used to “not only to make a bypass decision [whether or not to conduct a more intensive safety check], but also to record the results electronically without human interaction.” FMCSA anticipates conducting ten times more inspections when the Level 8 inspection is implemented into practice.
