Roadcheck Gets a Hit

In the movie “Bull Durham,” veteran minor league catcher Crash Davis offers a valuable lesson on the importance of attention to detail over time. Getting one extra base hit per week, every week, over the course of a six-month season can raise a player’s batting average to .300 from .250 — the difference between All-Star and ordinary. Sudden, dramatic events are wondrous to behold. After all, they sell newspapers, but Kevin Costner’s character made an important point that has an application for trucking.

The results of Roadcheck 2015 are in, and the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance said out-of-service rates for vehicles and drivers are both at record lows. Vehicle inspectors working for U.S. and Canadian law enforcement agencies performed more than 69,000 inspections over three days in June and found that the rate of serious violations dropped. For vehicles, 21.6% that went through a Level 1 inspection were placed out of service, down from 23% last year. Among drivers, the OOS rate dipped to 3.6% from 4%. To the layman, a 20-something OOS rate for vehicles probably sounds terrible. However, as a CVSA official said, the inspection selections are not a random sample of the nation’s trucks.

Officers are usually hunting for vehicles that probably will have violations. Because of that process, the direction of the statistic is more important than a given year’s number. When Roadcheck started in 1991, the OOS rates were 34.8% for vehicles and 5.6% for drivers. We are impressed by the improvement, even though it has been an incremental journey over 24 years. Furthermore, making improvements is becoming more costly. We learned recently that fleet costs increased, by 1.6% a year last year, according to a report from the American Transportation Research Institute. The ATRI report matches what we’ve been hearing of late in our weekly fuel stories. The drop in diesel prices is great, but whatever savings accrue also depart immediately for higher driver pay and new equipment. While avoiding new purchases can lead to higher maintenance costs, trading in old equipment for new tractors and trailers is also very costly. It’s an equipment-maintenance Catch 22. Whatever strategy a fleet takes, though, safety is not optional. As we saw at TMC SuperTech in Orlando, Florida, recently, the trucking industry’s maintenance technicians are genuinely passionate about keeping vehicles well-maintained and safe. One more base hit per week, and the rates might go even lower next year.