What were the things that jumped out to you when you were doing an inspction that both carriers and drivers should be thinking about?  

The first thing to ensure drivers know is that most of the scales out there, those pass-over weigh-in-motion stations, are incredibly sensitive. Make sure that you are driving slowly, as the speed is marked, so that they can get an accurate measurement. “Speeding through a station and over the scale will make our screens a blur,” says Bud Kneller, Frontline Commercial Vehicle Solutions. “Which is going to mean I have to talk to you and take you over to the scale where I weigh you per plate, rather than with the weigh-in-motion scale.”  

Secondly, first impressions are everything. When first approaching the vehicles, enforcers look for a few key things: the Commercial Vehicle Operator’s Registration (CVOR) rating ahead of time (whether the driver has any previous infractions), the state of the truck, the professionalism of the driver, and also the state of the cab. Is the truck well maintained? Is the driver alert, and willing to cooperate? Is the interior of their cab a mess, or is it relatively well organized – and, is the driver themself organized? Do they understand what the enforcer is asking for? All of these are good indicators if the truck is worth a deeper inspection.  

The inspection itself is usually consists of a cursory glance at the functionality of the lights, wheel rims and tires, annual inspection stickers, listening for air leaks, brakes on the trailer, etc.; and if enforcers don’t notice anything, then they send truckers on their way.  

The job of an enforcer is not to antagonize. They want first and foremost to keep roads safe. “I was an officer for a long time, and I tell carriers now that officers generally want to inspect bad trucks, right? Their job is to get bad trucks off the road to make the road safer,” says Alf Brown, Frontline Commercial Vehicle Solutions. “They don’t want to waste their time on a good truck that there’s nothing wrong with when ten bad trucks are going to go by. That is why they’re going to screen them efficiently, so that they have a better chance of making the road safer.”  

The job of an enforcer is not to antagonize. They want first and foremost to keep roads safe. “It’s about leveling the playing field,” says Kneller. “All of us collectively are focused on road safety. We’re looking at this from the perspective of bad apples because they skew the results; They’re the ones not investing in the things good carriers should be investing in and will be skewing the demand in the marketplace.”  

When you go in to do a facility audit, what are the most common problems you see? 

Number one, and possibly the most important, is the lack of proper documentation. “Carriers are not documenting training that they’re giving their drivers,” says Brown. “Not that they’re not training their drivers, just that they are not documenting it. Or maintenance issues as well. We look at it as though if it’s not written down, then it didn’t happen. Often the first thing out of a driver’s mouth when asked about a problem is ‘my boss never told me I had to do that,’ and the first words out of the carriers’ mouth when you do an audit is ‘I trained that guy and told them where that XYZ thing is…’ It is a really important thing to document everything. Not only as far as compliant with the law, but as far as protecting your liability and doing due diligence.”  

“When it comes to maintenance, we hear people say ‘when there’s an issue, we make sure to get it fixed.’ Which is an important thing, but to Alf’s point, if you don’t have it in writing, then you have nothing to go to court with. You have nothing to show the MTO, your insurance company, etc.,” says Kneller. “It’s much more important to have a trail of evidence as to what maintenance was done rather than trying to put out the image that there was nothing wrong in the first place.” 

“It is really important to take away that because people have this idea that showing no defects is the best care,” says Mark Murrell, CarriersEdge. “That’s unrealistic and will come back to bite you later. You’re much better to show, here are the things that went wrong, how we found it, and what we did about it.”