Another Year, Another Missed Deadline

This December the nation’s provincial and territorial governments were supposed to have safety ratings systems in place for operators of commercial trucks and buses. While the deadline is more than two months away there is no possible chance of meeting it.

This isn’t the first time a deadline on safety ratings has been missed. Rating procedures were originally supposed to be in place by January 1997. But the reason behind this latest missed deadline points to a disturbing flaw in the emerging procedures.

The deadline will be missed, in part, because some provinces are not committing the resources necessary to ensure they have a workable rating system. Although the process is proving more difficult to develop than originally anticipated, the resource issue can be dealt with easily enough. A bigger concern is that the rating procedures that are emerging are not consistent – a rather odd situation given that the safety-rating standard itself lists as a basic principle “consistency” and defines this as a process whereby carriers receive similar ratings in each jurisdiction for comparable performance.

A safety rating is like a report card with a passing grade of “Satisfactory” or “Satisfactory Audited” if a carrier has been subjected to a facility audit and comes out clean. A facility audit occurs when an inspector checks a carrier’s management procedures to see that all the safety regulations are being followed. A warning on the report card is a rating of “Conditional.” It’s like telling a motor carrier, “Smarten up or else…” A failing grade is “Unsatisfactory.” At this point, the right to operate a commercial vehicle is revoked or, at least, procedures (show-cause hearings) are started that can lead to that end. Ratings are based on a combination of on-road performance measures (road-related convictions, inspection results and collisions) and facility audit results. The exact combination of these measures varies from one jurisdiction to another.

To test how provinces and territories are coming along in the drafting of their procedures, the study documented the fate of a hypothetical motor carrier starting business in January 2000 and, for three years thereafter, experiencing a series of convictions, inspections and collisions. All jurisdictions were asked to subject this carrier to their rating procedures. Nine were able to do so and, even in these nine cases, some work is on the basis of partially complete or anticipated rating procedures. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario, the carrier is rated Conditional within five months of starting business. In Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Qubec and Saskatchewan, a Conditional rating is given in the second year of operation. In Manitoba, the rating procedures bump the carrier to a position where two rating levels – from Satisfactory unaudited to Unsatisfactory – may be considered in one move in year three. In Alberta, the rating has not been downgraded to Conditional at the end of the three years.

No consistency here!

Another test documented in the report is a series of events repeated often enough to have a carrier reach the point where an enforcement agency would downgrade the rating to Conditional. An example is shown in the accompanying chart. In this test, it is assumed that a fictional carrier has ten tractor-trailers or buses, ten company drivers and all driving is within the jurisdictional borders. Vehicles are then subjected to an unlimited number of roadside inspections and, in every case, one out-of-service defect is found. A charge is laid for operating a vehicle with brakes out of adjustment and a conviction results. The question is: how many such inspections does it take to have the carrier rated Conditional? It is assumed that, if a facility audit is conducted, the carrier passes the audit.

All these assumptions about the number of drivers, where the driving occurs and whether or not an audit is conducted are necessary to make the test work in some provinces.

On the chart, the orange area shows how many of these events (a CVSA inspection with one OOS defect and a resulting conviction) are necessary for the province to downgrade the rating to Conditional. In Qubec, a bus operator has to be shown separately from a truck operator and in Ontario there is a slight difference between the operator of a straight truck or a bus (single vehicles) and the operator of a tractor-trailer. In some cases, it is not possible to say with certainty where rating changes. This is the yellow-colored area on the chart. Newfoundland has the largest total colored area in that a Conditional rating may occur anywhere from 22 such events all the way up to 44.

As the chart shows, there is a large difference in how a motor carrier would be rated in one province compared to another. The strictest enforcer is Qubec where a bus operator could be rated Conditional after three inspections with out-of-service defects. A trucker in Qubec could be rated Conditional after five inspections. The most lenient enforcer appears to be Ontario where a tractor-trailer fleet would need 23 inspections with out-of-service defects before it would be rated Conditional. However, given the size of the colored area, the most lenient enforcer may actually be Newfoundland.

The categorisation of who is the strictest and who is the most lenient enforcer jumps around from one test to another so the particular example shown here is not the final word on the degree of toughness in the rating procedures. In particular, once collisions are added into the mix, Ontario becomes one of the more strict enforcers.

The key component of the report discussed at the Toronto meeting was a plan to make safety-rating procedures more consistent over the next four years. The first step is to insist that those provinces and territories implementing safety-rating procedures with major deviations from the agreed-to standard mend their ways. Either that or everyone has to agree to re-write the standard. As it now exists, the standard says that carriers will be rated on a base-plate (where the vehicles are plated) basis. Qubec and Ontario are not doing this. They rate everyone operating within their borders. As another example, the National Safety Code defines a commercial truck as one with a registered weight over 4,500 kilograms. The Prairie provinces, particularly Alberta, don’t follow this definition and, as a result, a great number of commercial vehicles fall outside the safety-rating procedures.

The second step in the plan is to insist that provinces and territories meet periodically over the next four years to compare how their rating procedures actually work. The industry should participate in this exercise. The idea is that some jurisdictions – the strictest or the most lenient – will have to change aspects of their procedures to make the process more consistent with other jurisdictions.