Rob Carpenter

Caroline: [00:00:00] Welcome to this week in Trucking. My name is Caroline. Compliance is one of the biggest challenges for people who run smaller fleets, and most of the time that’s because they’re also doing everything else that a trucking business needs, like booking loads and building relationships with customers and hiring drivers, or sometime driving the truck themselves.

Caroline: So compliance can get easily overlooked. The quickest way to lose money in this industry is to get an out of service order from the DOT. And if you’re not careful, too many dings on your safety records can lead to insurance being unaffordable or just completely inaccessible. So today we’re talking to Rob Carpenter, VP of Compliance at Truck Safe.

Caroline: Rob, thanks for being here.

Rob: Thank you for having me.

Caroline: Tell me about your background in trucking.

Rob: So I I started, I don’t know, 20 years ago as a truck driver. And then my goal was not to be, you know, I grew up on a farm, so I had familiarity with anything, diesel equipment, [00:01:00] trucks, et cetera. So went, got my CDL and moved on from there went and became a broker after that.

Rob: And then. Really did that to learn the business because you are, you’re only gonna learn so much from a driver’s seat. You, in order to learn the entire business, you kind of gotta span it out because there’s so many aspects to it. So when to become a broker then went and managed some businesses, small businesses, large businesses.

Rob: Then bought one of those businesses because the owner was retiring, sold the business. And then I went into private equity enterprise management overseeing 15 different DOT fleets. Across the country and for private equity, and then went into compliance after that. So it was one extreme to the other.

Caroline: That’s a long road to get there.

Rob: It is,

Caroline: So what are the most common compliance mistakes that you see small fleet owners and owner operators making?

Rob: I think a lot of it starts at the framework of your whole program. I wouldn’t say that there’s necessarily. Like root level issues to start. The whole thing a lot of times is just bad, because they don’t have the information [00:02:00] they need to get started. You don’t have a new interim audit generally until the first 18 months, right?

Rob: So if you operate for 12 months and then they come in at 12 months and they’re like, Hey, it’s more of an educational compliance review, we’re gonna kind of teach you something. It’s dude, I’ve been operating for 12 months this way. So I think the problem is partially that people go into this business.

Rob: A lot of times from a driver’s seat, and it’s, they’re so ignorant in some cases, just to how they have to operate. Part of it is the ignorance factor, just not knowing. Like I think people look at ignorance like it’s a bad word. It’s just you don’t know what you don’t know.

Caroline: No. You’re, when you say ignorant, you mean just lacking in information? Not willfully ignorant.

Rob: yeah. Yeah.

Caroline: don’t know.

Rob: And I think a lot of ’em are like that. And one of the attorneys I work with at Truck Safe he’s actually in our, one of the other companies that are, they’re kind of tied together, but, Tyler Biddle. And one of the pieces that he focuses on is contracts for owner operators and people that are coming from the driver’s seat and how to review these contracts, whether you’re leasing [00:03:00] on with a carrier, and the common pitfalls that we as drivers make.

Rob: Not knowing, or a lot of times, not necessarily not knowing, but just not reading the contract before you sign it. So there’s so many things that go into going from the driver’s seat to running and owning a company that I think a lot of us miss, you know, from the driver’s seat, especially if you have an entrepreneurial spirit.

Rob: It’s oh, I’m running for this truck and this guy’s making 6,000 a week off me. All I gotta do is get my own truck and I’ll make the $6,000 a week for myself. Nobody looks at. How cash flow intensive the business is and how much you might net, which may be nothing, at this point. But I think there’s so much un willful ignorance, let’s put it that way.

Rob: Not just from the compliance side, but from the whole operations piece. I think a lot of times we get in it thinking this it’s almost like a pipe dream, right? You think it’s gonna be great and then it’s great, but it’s not as lucrative as you thought

Caroline: Can you tell me about a client that you’ve worked with at Truck Safe [00:04:00] that you know, can you, do you have any stories about a client that you’ve worked with that’s like a small, either a small fleet or an owner operator that, that made some pretty critical mistakes,

Rob: So we have ’em all the time. That’s why they call us. So all of our stories are usually, you know, heartbreaks.

Rob: And some of em are worse than others. A lot of people coming from the driver’s seat don’t realize that a history of non-compliance can put you not just outta service for the instance, but can put you unsatisfactory, which means you can’t operate at all.

Rob: And so many truck drivers miss those pieces of it. Just there’s a there’s some one and done violations where you can lose your CDL immediately for one violation. If you’re hauling hazmat and you don’t stop at a rail crossing, that’s an immediate 60 day suspension. If you’re convicted. So a lot of people don’t look at these one and dones and realize that, oh, they can actually put me completely out, whether it’s as an imminent hazard or whether it’s as an unsat rating, they can close your business.

Rob: And some of those are the most heartbreaking instances. We just did [00:05:00] one in Indiana, and when these happen, you have to come to people like us. You can do it yourself. It’s gonna take longer, but if you come to us, we can file your safety management plan and your upgrade request with F-M-C-S-A and try to get that unsat, at least to an unrated.

Rob: You might not get to satisfactory. You’re probably gonna get to conditional or unrated, but it’ll at least get your doors back open.

Caroline: You’ll at least be able to continue operating

Rob: Yeah. And in this case, the most recent case that I’m referring to now, this was 120 truck drivers, that’s 120 drivers that now have no work to do. So obviously they’re not gonna stick around and wait what could be 60 to 90 days for your upgrade request to go through while they don’t work.

Rob: So when you finally get that upgrade, one of the big issues you’re gonna have is do you have the manpower to reopen your doors to, even if you got the upgrade. So many people, I think miss that piece of there is a real possibility you could be closed. Some of these violations are, it’s gonna take more of them.

Rob: For instance, hours of [00:06:00] service. You don’t need very many hours of service violations to become unsaid or conditional because they’re double weighted. They’re hours of service violations are double weighted compared to, say, a roadside violation for, you know, of all tire.

Caroline: Does that mean? That they’re double weighted? Like they just matter more in their, in the safety score system.

Rob: Yeah, so the, you have a scoring methodology within C-S-A-S-M-S, et cetera, that basically rates violations from like zero to 10 and say, you have an egregious violation of hours of service. False, a false log, they’ll give you a 10, they’ll put you out a service, which then adds more points to the 10.

Rob: Which it’s double weighted. So instead of a 10, it’s now a 20 plus two or plus four. So there’s different weights that go to these things, but all hours of service violations are double weighted. So they hit you harder. They hit you faster. So it doesn’t take very many, which was the issue in this Indiana case, to close your doors.

Rob: So that’s a huge issue that I don’t think a lot of people really think about. They just think, oh I get the violation. Maybe they’ll give me. A [00:07:00] $2,500 or a 5,000 or a $10,000 fine. It’s just the cost of doing business. It may be the final cost of doing business and you may not be able to do business anymore.

Rob: It’s not just that, that really hits you. If once you start getting these violations, you gotta come up for renewal every year on your insurance. So when they run that cab report and they’ve got all this information, your premium goes to $35,000 a truck, if they’ll even quote it. I think people generally getting started in the business don’t understand those two key aspects that can just close your doors to date.

Caroline: And in your experience, are people coming to you when they’re already out of service?

Rob: most of the

Caroline: that’s most of the

Caroline: time,

Rob: so you have a timeframe. Once you have a, let’s just say a compliance review, you’ve had your compliance review, you’re gonna basically get your notice of. Claim and everything. And then what happens is you have so many days to respond. That means you can get these fines settled, you can get them cut in half.

Rob: A lot of times we’re successful at that. We have ca had cases where we got fines completely gone. And then there’s [00:08:00] other things, other ways you can appeal these things. So if you exhaust that timeframe and you don’t have the time to appeal anymore, now you’re stuck paying the full fine and you’ve gotta file the upgrade.

Rob: Upgrade requests take time. So generally between, I like to say 45 to 60 days at a minimum, but that’s not realistic because the agency is wiped in terms of human resources. They don’t have the capacity to manage these upgrades the way they should, so we just did one. I probably file more upgrade requests than we do anything else. I

Caroline: Can you, des, can you describe what an upgrade request is?

Rob: So when you get that unsat rating, that notice of claim, and you’ve got your fine and you’ve got your 93 page long you know, disposition. Basically it’s gonna say, based on the following, acute and critical violations from this compliance review, we have decided to rate you unsat and your unsat generally, if you’re conditional and more than one base, more than two basics.

Rob: So two basics. You’re unset when you’re unset. You’re closed, and usually it’s not immediate. Usually it takes 30 days, but once [00:09:00] that ruling goes into effect, you’re closed. You can’t operate anymore. You can’t move the tags to somewhere else. The lease on, you’re just done. So at that point, the only thing you can do is petition the F-M-C-S-A, to essentially upgrade your rating from an unsat to either an unrated or a conditional that’ll get you back in business.

Rob: But that’s not, it’s not guaranteed that it’ll happen. Because you have to show that safety, basically the plan that you’re using to propose A, this is the corrective action that I’ve taken to address every single critical and acute violation and every sys single, system and process issue that I have so that this doesn’t happen in the future.

Rob: So that’s essentially what you have to file to get that rating upgraded un, and until they get it and then they approve it, you’re not gonna open again.

Caroline: So what can carriers do to avoid getting to that stage so late in the game? Let’s say I am in a better, you know, I don’t have a great compliance program, but at least I haven’t been given that unsatisfactory rating. How can I avoid that [00:10:00] unsatisfactory rating? I.

Rob: so what’s gonna happen is you don’t just get compliance reviews in general. Like they don’t just show up at your door if you’re doing everything you’re supposed to do. They have to prioritize enforcement because they don’t. Don’t have a lot of people to com to, you know, prioritize enforcement. So when they focus on people, they have to focus on the most egregious people.

Rob: So what they do is they look at your thresholds for your base. Once you get over a certain threshold, let’s just say for maintenance, you’re probably gonna get a letter and it’s gonna say, Hey, Rob Carpenter, we’ve noticed that your fleet is over a threshold on your basic category. If you don’t clean this up.

Rob: The next step may be we show up at your door and we do a full compliance review or a focus compliance audit. And in those cases, basically you have the opportunity to fix it. Now, it’s not to say that they won’t show up without that notice, but generally that’s how it flows. So before you can get to that piece, you kind of see that your record is getting funny, right?

Rob: And you realize that you’re being pulled over more. And it’s kind of this vicious cycle because the more violations you get. The worse your ISS score gets and the [00:11:00] more times you get pulled over. So it’s imperative that people have good workflows, good systems, good processes in place from the beginning.

Rob: And if they don’t know what they are, then they need to call somebody that does. So whether that’s truck safe or fleet worthy, or another consultant that it can actually say, Hey, we can help you by doing the following things. And it’s good to have that anyway because when they come for their new infant.

Rob: If they’re going to want to see that you have foundations in place to manage a good program. If you don’t, you’re not gonna manage a good program. So that’s essentially all you can do is just run as, as compliant of a system as you can.

Caroline: If you’re a one truck operation. You know when you get a violation, right? Like it’s really clear. If you have a couple of trucks as the owner, you might not notice a violation because it’s somebody else driving your truck. How can those owners stay up to date on what violations hit their mc?

Rob: So one of the important things to consider is technology [00:12:00] in this entire process. So one of the pieces of technology that exists, whether. A lot of times it’s built into SOMBA safety, whether you’re doing continuous license monitoring on your drivers, it’s built in there and it’ll notify you that, hey, you have a CSA violation, you have a whatever.

Rob: And that’s essentially how you can do it with almost any system. So a lot of a TS systems, 10 Street, they have the same thing. A lot of these companies are getting to the point where they’ve integrated with F-M-C-S-A and that data is coming through once a month. To say, Hey, your driver, Rob Carpenter, got a violation in Texas on the 19th.

Rob: You’re thinking, wait a minute. I don’t have this Aspen disposition form for my driver. Where is it? So that’s when you contact your driver to say, Hey, you got this violation. Why didn’t you tell us about this? That’s really important from a tech perspective. It basically tells on everything for you.

Rob: You don’t have to track it. Now, if you don’t wanna buy all that stuff, you can still do it the old fashioned way. Put it on your calendar every 30 days to go in and check your, basically your F-M-C-S-A profile to see if you’ve had any violations in the past [00:13:00] 30 days or any crashes in the past 30 days that haven’t been reported.

Rob: So that’s really how you keep tabs on everything. But I think for me, even when I own my fleet, you know, we didn’t have tech like that. So I would check every 30 days and then if I didn’t have the form. Then I would have to get it. And generally they have to be signed and sent back in to say that you’ve you know, and you’ve corrected it.

Rob: But that’s generally how I found out. And a lot of the, a lot of good things about tech is you can usually get almost everything you need from one vendor if you pick the right vendor. You don’t have to go. And you know, I go to some people and it’s like, what do you use for cameras?

Rob: Will we use this? What do you use for brs? And I use this and before you know it, they got 15 different

Rob: vendors where they could have just got one to do all of it.

Rob: So, Fewer vendors the better for me because it’s just, it just makes four or more scalable program and it’s something easier for you to manage.

Caroline: Who are your favorite vendors in that aspect?

Rob: I, so everybody asked me this. This is probably my most requested thing, [00:14:00] and I don’t, I can’t tell you directly. Usually what I tell people is there’s no cookie cutter approach to any of it. If you have one truck, don’t buy any of it. Don’t, you don’t need a motive. You don’t need a samsara. Go buy a non-recurring Nexar or a Garmin for your truck and get yourself a manila folder and use your calendar.

Rob: You don’t need any more than that

Rob: you have the intention of needing a scalable program in the future

Caroline: If you’re planning to buy a bunch of trucks in the near future, you

Caroline: should have a system in place.

Rob: Yes and in those cases, if I know that your intention is to grow and then don’t start with a manila folder and a garment because it’s not gonna be scalable in the future. Now if you’re a larger fleet enterprise fleets like I had where you had 104 terminal managers across the country, if you don’t have the automation and the scalability and the integrations that are built in, you’ll never manage this effectively and you’ll have huge wasted labor issues because you’ll need five different people to help you. So in those operations, I look for the all in ones. Higher rate is a good one [00:15:00] because anything you need from drug and alcohol to BRS to criminal background, you can get it all from them. Checker is another one. Pretty much equal to hire rate. They can do everything I just said, just like hire rate can.

Rob: Even if you add in like fit for duty, say you’ve got some flatbed folks that you want to add in fit for duty testing, all you have to do is turn it on. The good thing about HireRight is it integrates with systems like 10 Street, where 10 Street can do all of those things and you can use 10th Street to basically do all of the ordering through hire rate all in the same system. Then you’ve got Motive. So Motive is an all-in-one. A lot of people say what’s the difference between Motive and nro? NRO has a great camera. There’s no argument there. The difference really between the two, they run pretty much on the same AI compressor from a visual perspective. The difference between the two is Ndy runs a camera, that’s it.

Rob: They have coaching, but that’s it. When you go to Motive, you’ve got fuel card, you’ve got camera, you’ve got ELD. Et cetera. So when I start thinking about how to manage a program, I look at the seven basics and I have a I [00:16:00] basically give this out to whoever. I’ve got a mind map that kind of shows you what flows together and who the best vendors are for what size fleet you have. And that’s not just the cookie cutter approach, right? Like 10th Street is comparable to say, driver reach. They have more stuff than driver reach. And they’re comparable with fleet worthy and haul. So it’s not just one. There’s others out there. It’s just those are the ones that I’ve found that integrate the best and they function well together.

Caroline: Cool. What if I’m operating like between five and 15 trucks? Like maybe I just have one, you know, one lot. I’ve got, you know, maybe a dozen drivers.

Rob: I. Only based on cost. I would go with something like haul for a TS. So bringing up, basically storing all your driver data, storing your vehicle data, it’s not overly expensive. You’re not paying $10,000 a month for a 10 street because you don’t need it, but it’ll help you do a lot of the same functionality.

Rob: And with 20 trucks you can, you don’t need all the integrations that you need with somebody with [00:17:00] 5,000 trucks. So I would say haul. Motive or nexar, motive nexar or nro. And then and it also depends on short haul too, right? Because if you don’t need ELD, you can just say I don’t really need all the bells and whistles of motive.

Rob: I’m gonna go with NRO and I’ll just run time sheets. So it’s all suspect based on this, how you census your fleet. So census your fleet, figure out what you need, figure out what you want, and then kind of. S blend it together. But I would say just for that size fleet, the quick and dirty rundown of haul, Reine, Ormo, and then higher rider checker.

Caroline: Cool. And. For people who are just thinking about entering this business, starting a trucking business, can you talk a little bit, give us a quick rundown of the seven basics, what that means, and what are some of the more common areas where you see,

Caroline: violations?

Rob: The big ones are maintenance and part of the reason is there’s so much that’s consolidated under maintenance. Maintenance isn’t just your tires and your lights, but it’s also load securement issues fall under maintenance category, which is a huge

Rob: problem. So all of [00:18:00] those things fall under maintenance and a lot of people just don’t maintain their trucks.

Rob: It’s just, Hey, set it and forget it. My diesel will run as long as I put diesel in it. And that’s just not the mindset that you have to have. You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta develop some predictive maintenance model in your head to say. My tires are only good for a hundred thousand miles. I’m at 80. Maybe I need to start looking at that.

Rob: So maintenance is a huge one, which again, all of these have their own thresholds and every threshold is different. So you’ve got maintenance, which is a big one. Hours of service is huge because it’s double weighted and it’s got so many petty violations that can easily add up because they’re double weighted.

Rob: So even if you have. Say it’s not a false log, say it’s just something as simple as, I don’t have my ELD manual. That can be

Rob: a high point value violation just because you, you weren’t organized. There’s some more that are egregious, obviously true falsification of logs. So maintenance out of service drug and alcohol is almost non-existent because nobody does drug and alcohol testing on the side of the road.

Rob: You’re generally only gonna get those [00:19:00] violations if well. In a compliance review, but I have seen a lot on the roadside. It’s just not as many. So drug and alcohol, maintenance, hours of service crash, hazmat driver fitness and unsafe driving. So unsafe driving is a huge problem because that’s usually like the gateway drug, right?

Rob: So they don’t necessarily know that your ELD is bad. They don’t know that you don’t have one. They don’t know that your log is false. If you go by them and they see that your truck is either not well maintained or you’re going 10 over the speed limit, like that maintenance issue, that’s so obvious. Or that behavior is so obvious that they pull you over and then they get you for a lot of other things.

Caroline: It’s indicative of

Caroline: Things that might not be visible, might not be observable at first.

Rob: A lot of the advice I give for this international road check that happens every year, it’s clean your truck. Just wash your truck and make sure it’s spotless. Because if I’m an F-M-C-S-A, if I’m in commercial enforcement whether it’s a state partner or DOT and you come through and you have a spotless chrome shined brand new [00:20:00] Peter built, that’s going to Matt’s. And then I have a log truck pull up next to me that’s caked with mud. Tires are half balled. I’m going to go where I feel. My time is best spent. Where am I gonna get the most violation? Probably not from that Peterbilt guy.

Rob: He’s clean. So a lot of it goes to just how you look and how you behave, how often you’re gonna get pulled over.

Rob: Now that’s not necessarily true if you have a high ISS score, and that’s one of the things that I think a lot of people don’t understand. What does an ISS score? So ISS scores are zero to a hundred. The closer you are to zero, the less likely you are to get pulled over. When they run your DOT, you’re gonna get a score.

Rob: When you go through the scale, they’re gonna see your score. So if your score is a 98, you have to get pulled in. So 75 to a hundred is a must pull. I think it’s 50 to 75 is an option, and then zero to 50 is just let ’em go. So when you get into that scale, and every time, all the way down 95 from Virginia to Florida. Pull in, bring in your logs, bring in your logs, bring it. There’s a reason there. They’re not just doing [00:21:00] it because they dislike you, they’re doing it because they dislike the DOT number on the side of the truck. Your behavior historically affects that ISS number. So the more violations you historically have, the higher that number gets.

Caroline: How can I check my ISS score?

Rob: If you can log into F-M-C-S-A, it’s not public data, but we pay for it. So even though it’s not public, people can buy it just like with your cab report for

Rob: insurance. So if you think if I don’t let them log in, the insurance people can’t see my ISS score, or they can’t see what basics, I’m in an alert status.

Rob: We pay for that through a company called Carrier Software that gives us all your backend data, including your email and your phone number. And that’s why you get all these phone calls as carrier because people buy that data. essentially that’s how you can go in and check it. And then from there, if you see something erroneous in there that’s not yours, like when we spoke a few minutes ago about you get the violation or your driver doesn’t tell you about it. You can data cue these violations. And that’s one of the things that we’re gonna talk about at Matt’s is it’s not so much about compliance at Matt’s, it’s more of a focus on how [00:22:00] you can get rid of the violations that aren’t yours or that aren’t accurate, or weren’t justified. And then how you can keep your trucks on the road, you know, long term, why compliance is important,

Caroline: Tell us about that, because I’m not gonna be able to make it to maths this year. So I wanna hear all about what you’re gonna talk about, because I’m gonna miss you on the stage.

Rob: So it, what was important for me for maths is I’m an old school truck driver, right? So it’s like I, my, my Twitter handle is still white smoke. And it’s white smoke because I didn’t obey any of the rules, when I drove. A lot of people are that way, but what I wanted to have is something that bridged the absence of compliance mindset to the operations side, and I wanted to have people understand why compliance is important.

Rob: Even to this day, I get a lot of, I can’t believe it. You’re a trader. You jumped over to the compliance side and it’s

Caroline: Oh man.

Rob: the thing with compliance is it’s like the necessary evil, right? Like I’m not in love with it, even though I do it. At the end of the day, it’s what keeps you in business. So whether you [00:23:00] look at it from a safety mindset like, Hey, I’m here to preserve life and property, which is the ethical, moral way to look at it.

Rob: Or if you’re looking at it from an operations model that says, Hey, I’m just doing this to stay in business. I don’t care so much how you look at it. You just have to understand that the compliance model that you decide is going to be determine your longevity in the business. If you want to run successful and you want to continue running every year with the lowest premiums possible, or running at all, that’s what’s important.

Rob: So there is definitely a bridge between compliance and operations, and I think a lot of people fail to understand it.

Caroline: Talk about the data queue process. We’ve heard about this before. We have another compliance expert that. Came on to do a workshop with us once and talked a little bit about the data queue process, but basically from my understanding, it’s you get a violation that’s not actually yours, like you can see or you can talk with your driver.

Caroline: That wasn’t me. That didn’t happen, or No, actually the officer misunderstood. That’s not true, and I have the evidence to back it up. What can [00:24:00] you do?

Rob: So you get different. I’ll break it down in two different ways. One, you can have violations. So let’s just say I just got one that was, and I didn’t think I was gonna beat it because I’ve never beat one of these before. So I filed a lot of these for other people. This guy’s driver had a phone use, handheld phone use violation, and I told him up front like I’m, I’ll do it, but odds are not good.

Rob: So I filed it and what I filed it with was an argument that his cell phone record showed that he was not using that phone in any way, shape or form at that time. We used GPS from his telematics system to show where he was. At what time when he got this violation and he was not on this phone anytime in the previous 20 minutes.

Rob: Not text, call, internet, nothing. So we beat it and what happens is you file this with F-M-C-S-A, you log in just like you would to look at your ISS. You find the violation that you want to argue and then you submit your evidence and you make that argument. Now, what’s bad about data queue is there’s no due process.

Rob: So I [00:25:00] say this, it’s not like you’re going in front of some objective judge that knows nothing about it. The very first person to review this is the guy who wrote you the violation to begin with. Seems just right. So they’re more often than not, and most likely going to get denied, at least on the front end.

Rob: Sometimes if it’s so blatant it was wrong, they’ll just get rid of it. Then you can refile again, and you can take these all the way to the court level and fight them, but most people don’t because it’s expensive. So unless it has serious bearing, they’re not gonna do that. So the second time it goes up, it goes to the supervisor or the person that wrote it, which still isn’t much better, but it does, it is a little more objective. So that’s how a data queue flows. And then there’s correspondence in that portal between you and the officer and, that’s it. So you can submit dash cam footage, you can submit all kinds of arguments, photos, whatever you want. That’s the gist of it. The second part of the data queue program is crash.

Rob: Was this crash preventable? It shouldn’t be on my record, it wasn’t my fault, somebody committed suicide by jumping into the front of my truck. Those you can go in and file [00:26:00] basically a crash preventability determination and say, here’s all the evidence. Here’s the camera. This guy jumping in front of me, it wasn’t my fault.

Rob: Nothing I could do to prevent it. And in those cases, they’ll rule on those just like they would any other data queue. But in this case, it’s to have crashes removed from your crash register, which helps your crash basic. But ultimately it really helps your insurance premiums at the end of the year because the fewer crashes that are on that record obviously help you.

Rob: So that’s the program in a nutshell. But they were. Implementing an appeals board. They talked about this maybe two years ago. Two years ago. We still don’t have an appeals board. We don’t know anything about this appeals board. We just know that there’s going to be one. Supposedly it’s not there yet. So the good thing about crash the Crash Preventability program is you were restricted to so few types of crashes that you could argue. Now they’ve expanded that a lot. So it’s gotten a lot easier to file preventability challenges with adequate. So that’s essentially how that works. But really your goal is to try to get some of these [00:27:00] violations and crashes removed to lower your threshold to make you look better.

Caroline: If you were the head of DOT, what changes would you make to the trucking compliance system?

Rob: I, I know a little bit about what’s been going on in the past couple months in terms of selection, and there was a lot of people that were chosen to be the F-M-C-S-A administrator. And from what I understand, like the first six turned it down.

Rob: And part of the reason that right now we have an acting one that was named this week, but part of the reason no one wants this job is F-M-C-S-A was already taxed.

Rob: It had less than a thousand people working there. They do not have the human resources. To manage the number of people they have to manage in terms of compliance. There’s

Caroline: Yeah. How? Yeah. No kidding. How many carriers are there in the us? Like

Rob: Yeah.

Rob: And a thousand people are doing all the work for F-M-C-S-A,

Rob: so completely understaffed. And now what’s making it worse is a lot of them have taken buyouts under the new administration.

Rob: A lot of ’em have been laid off, A lot of ’em have taken buyouts. A lot of ’em have take chosen early retirement. So now we don’t know the numbers yet, but we know it’s a lot less than a [00:28:00] thousand. So we don’t know what’s gonna happen, but essentially you’re gonna have to rebuild the agency. And one of the things that I’ve looked at is using, third parties, you know, they used to use third parties under contract, a lot like us.

Rob: They don’t do it so much anymore, but that’s one of the things, basically build your army with external people. If you don’t have the people, you don’t have the capacity to meet the volume demands, then just like trucking, you’ve gotta find another way to either artificially inflate your capacity.

Rob: You’ve gotta reduce your volume, and that was, you know, it’s what you gotta do. So for me, that’s pretty much where I would start, is start trimming it down and really use the F-M-C-S-A as an oversight agency while you’re letting other people, basically manage the day-to-day tasks of reviewing people for compliance.

Rob: The problem with that is, is you have to trust the third parties that you select. And not all of them are the best.

Caroline: Trustworthy.

Rob: Correct. So the, you know, it opens it up to a lot of different things like bribes, which is common and things like that. So I don’t know what the [00:29:00] answer is. That’s just what my answer would be.

Caroline: I think it’s a thoughtful answer. And somebody who thinks they know all the answers to everything is never the best person for the job.

Caroline: So yeah, I, I don’t know. Would you if you were offered that job tomorrow, would you take it

Rob: Probably

Caroline: all right. You hear that?

Rob: yeah. Yeah.

Caroline: Let’s try to get this this message out. Comment below if you want Rob to be the head of the F-M-C-S-A.

Rob: I had gotten a call from somebody who was selected and turned it down so I understood what’s going on in the selection process. I know, I kind of know who turned it down and I kind of know who was like option G

Rob: Or option K.

Rob: So the funny thing about the process for selection that I found was that I didn’t like who got to make that decision.

Rob: There were like third party people who had nothing to do with government that had their hands in making the decision on who this person was gonna be.

Rob: And I think one of the things that I’ve always disliked about. Maybe it’s the truck driver in me that says, why do we have people working in the F-M-C-S-A that have no practical [00:30:00] knowledge beyond book sets?

Rob: And that’s a lot of the cases. We had an auditor last year who was a new auditor. He’d only been finished and completed training for 60 days. He was a Papa John’s delivery driver before he was an F-M-C-S-A auditor. So it’s

Rob: Yes, you have a thousand people, but how effective are the thousand people, even if you train them?

Rob: I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I still don’t know probably 50% of what there is to learn because there’s so much in like methodologies in terms of scorings and ratings that you have to pick up. And he’ll probably learn it pretty quick if he’s still there, because he does it every day.

Rob: But

Rob: It’s, a tough job and I think whoever. I don’t know that the woman who just took it, we have actually talked a couple times. I think she’s gonna be on our Truck Safe podcast.

Caroline: Cool.

Rob: I like her. I just don’t know. She comes from the Federal Highway Administration, which is a better run agency because they don’t have the chaos that F-M-C-S-A has.

Rob: I’m interested in seeing how that plays out.

Caroline: Yeah, definitely. Good luck to her. Yeah, it’s a tough job and I think I do think that [00:31:00] it’s good to have people in those agencies. It just makes sense to have people in those agencies that have industry experience. And you needed. Diverse group of people that have all the different skills that you would need.

Caroline: And it sounds like they need a lot more power to be able to a lot more manpower, I should say, to just address all the concerns that people have and make trucking compliance something that is understandable and usable for the industry because we really can’t run this industry without really good governance.

Rob: Yeah, and part of that good governance is the problem that we have. It’s not necessarily between one administration and the next, but since we’re in 2025. Obviously, but since 2020 we’ve had eight different administrators at the F-M-C-S-A. So if you think that a four year term for a president can’t change anything, how much time do you think six months as an administrator’s gonna change?

Rob: It’s difficult to change from one administrator to the next on a constant basis and just constant revolving leadership and actually expect something to be better, [00:32:00] because they’re going to leave and then the next one’s gonna come in and think they can do a better job and change it all the way up.

Rob: Then you had an issue with one of the past administrators who proposed a speed limiter rule that everyone hated, including me. And then they found out that she was getting she had some backdoor dealings on that. So the speed limiter deal went away, and so did she. It’s just a mess. And so I think taking on the role, the good part about it for me would be.

Rob: Someone who’s already taken large businesses across the country and then developed them into successful systems. And I think that’s what you need. And maybe that’s her coming from the Federal Highway, you know, but and maybe that’s why they chose her, I don’t know. But I think some of the leadership issues have to be resolved before you’re gonna see real change.

Caroline: Definitely. Tell me about speed limiters. Your thoughts on them, why you think they’re a bad idea.

Rob: Speed limiters is, it’s a heartburn topic. So I don’t like speed limiters for the reason that I think speed kills a lot of people every year. No question. Not arguing that at all. What I am arguing is 80% of commercially involved [00:33:00] crashes. Crashes that involve commercial vehicles are 80% of the time it’s the fault of the non-commercial vehicle.

Rob: Not the commercial vehicle that, that’s a true study. That’s not something Rob made up and truck drivers talk about that just came out of thin air from the truck stop. You know, rumor mill, that’s a true study. So my thought process in that is one, it’s not the commercials, commercial drivers’, commercial vehicles issue anyway, it’s actually starting at the four wheeler level,

Rob: just regular vehicles.

Rob: But the second part of it is to be a truck driver, whether, especially if you’re in Colorado or some parts of California, especially Washington state. You need to be able to overtake other vehicles. So it’s difficult. If you look at California per se, that’s stuck at 55 for the entire state if you’re a tractor trailer.

Rob: So that state has a lot of crashes. Has a lot of crashes because you have a lot of trucks impeding traffic, which are making cars mad, and then you’ve got road rage, and then you’ve got a number of other issues. So speed might not be their problem, but slow speed is their problem. So speed limiters I had an issue with because I’m just not in favor of [00:34:00] taking that much control away from a truck because sometimes they need that control. The other one that was proposed at the same time was the auto braking feature. And I can see how that’s helpful because obviously if you’ve got a Ford Collision warning, it’s gonna say, Hey, you’ve got this happening, you need to stop. One of the things that I still do is I drive like prototypes or brand new vehicles from factories.

Rob: So not gonna tell you what make this was, but I picked it up in Virginia and I’m coming up on a red light, maybe 300 feet away as a human. And I’m, I can’t knock autonomous because most of the autonomous people are companies are our clients. But I’ll say this, I as a human could recognize that in 300 feet I see the blinker of the car.

Rob: The car is making their turn. And as I get closer, there’s a little tail end of their car hanging out. Truck completely locks up, unexpected, you don’t know it’s gonna happen. And if I wasn’t prepared, like with my hands on the wheel, I would’ve wrecked simply because the truck decided to stop, because it doesn’t have the human element to say not yet anyway, to say, Hey, this car’s gonna, it’s gonna, it’s gonna be [00:35:00] okay.

Rob: The car’s gonna finish its turn. I could judge that, but the radar and the truck couldn’t judge that. So I think for now it’s kinda like the robo taxis of Cruz and Waymo that calls the cata, you know, the catastrophes out west in SFO and Arizona where it just, they’re not there yet. So maybe private tracks until you figure it a hundred figured out a hundred percent.

Rob: But, I don’t think it’s there yet. I’m not.

Caroline: Yeah I sometimes think that the autonomous trucking conversation gets a little confused as if we’re gonna go either completely driver controlled or completely ai, you know, general ai, controlled. I don’t think it’s ever, first of all, it’s not completely. Driver controlled anymore

Caroline: at, at all. There’s like cruise control.

Caroline: That’s not, you’re not controlling the speed then, but you can override it and you can, it’s like an interaction between the human and technology and maybe there’s a little bit of a shift in the sort of gradient that gives from total human control to [00:36:00] total AI control. But I think that people misunderstand it in thinking that, oh, we should try to do AI controlled.

Caroline: All the way a hundred percent tomorrow. I think that there’s gonna be a transition there where you can, you should be all, you know, maybe human judgment and computer judgment are just augmenting each other, not overriding, completely overriding human judgment. That seems like a dangerous step to take too soon, and I don’t think that anyone is suggesting that we do that too soon.

Caroline: Or maybe they are. I don’t talk to a lot of autonomous trucking

Rob: I think you’re seeing it a lot more in cars because I think people think cars can only do so much damage, waymo and Cruise is a good example because they got pretty much, you know, unrestricted access to just run your completely driverless vehicle around town and let it run into fire trucks and kill people and catch fire and all kinds of things without any kind of repercussions.

Rob: And that’s one piece, but I don’t hear it happening in trucks.

Rob: So we have clients that run autonomous vehicles. They run them on straight [00:37:00] shoots, making long-term beer deliveries or, you know, from, let’s just say Dallas to New Mexico, which is a straight shot. They’re not going into any kind of close quarters of inner city or anything like that.

Rob: And then you also have things like piloted vehicles like beep. So beep is down. They’re in a lot of places now. They’re in Yellowstone Park, they’re in Florida in a lot of places. But Beep has no driver in it. It is piloted by a remote driver.

Rob: So you’re going around a closed loop, like at the mall or at, let’s just say the Mayo Clinic.

Rob: They’re picking you up at the parking lot. It’s going to one location and it’s coming right back. So I think right now, from a commercial perspective, most of that’s already kind of planned, but it’s targeted, right? Like they’re not throwing it in downtown New York. So it’ll get there.

Rob: It’s just not there yet.

Caroline: Yeah. Yeah. Rob, it was awesome talking to you. Thank you so much for making the time to come on this weekend, trucking lots of really cool insights. Is there anything else that you wanna share?

Rob: I don’t think so. Hopefully we’ll see everybody else but you at Matt’s now.

Caroline: I. I know I’m bummed. We did go last year. We had a [00:38:00] blast. And I wish we were going again this year. We’re gonna miss it, miss out. But we will check out the, the recordings that come out of it and we’ll definitely post yours. And if it’s already out by the time we publish this, then I will put it in the description.

Caroline: We’ll also put the. Website to Truck Safe in the description. If you liked this video and you like listening to conversations like this and learning stuff about the trucking industry, make sure you subscribe to this weekend Trucking and give us a like, also, if you have questions for Rob about trucking compliance or I don’t know anything else, like where he got his hat, go ahead and put that in the comments and we will send those questions to him, get you answers. So thanks so much for joining us and drive safe everybody.