Driver’s Side: Safety … or Compliance?

The folks who’ve managed to convince us that to be safe you must be compliant have really made a mess of things. The link between compliance and safety is obvious in many cases, but in others it’s highly exaggerated. In a few more cases, it’s completely non-existent. Here are two examples of how safety can actually be jeopardized by compliance.

My first example revolves around hours-of-service regulations, particularly the American version. They were written into law in 1936, and they’ve been revised only twice since then. They were also written, for all intents and purposes, by the labor unions. Science hadn’t even begun to understand what sleep cycles were all about back then, or what circadian rhythms meant. In fact, there wasn’t one iota of scientific research applied to the creation of those foolish, now antiquated regs. Yet as long as we’re in compliance with them, we’re presumed safe.

Doing as you’re told under these circumstances can kill you: if you run over-the-road under the U.S. rules, driving for 10 hours and then sleeping for eight, you’ll be going to bed six hours earlier each day than the day before. This pattern destroys your natural sleep rhythms. After four days out, you’ll have completely reversed your awake and asleep times.

Scientists will tell you that advancing your bedtime is probably the worst thing you can do. Yet, that’s exactly what American HOS rules force on you.

And now we’ve got a real problem in trying to change to regulations that reflect modern understanding. There’s a bunch of misguided citizens’ groups and bureaucrats who seem to believe that the existing law must be the best possible alternative, simply because it’s already a law. The American and Canadian versions of CRASH, a woefully misinformed Canadian senator named Mira Spivak, and many within the automobile associations, to name a few, are openly suggesting Canada adopt the existing U.S. version, suggesting it would benefit the driver. They seem to believe that modern science must be flawed because it’s at odds with the present law — yet it’s one that’s never been examined in a scientific light.

I’ll go a step further here and bet a week’s pay that not one of the clowns proposing to keep or revert to the current U.S. regulations (10 driving, five on, which you’ll never use in a highway situation, and eight off) has ever spent a week or three living according to a logbook. If they had, they’d know there was a problem. But when we try to explain it to them, they point at our logs and call us criminals because we aren’t willing to comply with their dangerous regulations.

The other big problem I have with compliance versus safety revolves around brake adjustment. You could argue all day that exceeding your stroke limit by as much as one-quarter of an inch doesn’t necessarily mean your truck is inherently unsafe. Even with all the brakes that far out of adjustment, there’s still enough there to stop you in normal situations. The experts are concerned about reserve braking power and emergency stops, so they use an appropriate stroke length for the particular chamber size as a line in the sand. It’s a reasonable limit, but that’s not what concerns me.

I think we, as an industry, are so concerned about compliance that we’ve become too focused on the adjustment thing. We’ve all but ignored some real brake-related safety concerns.

Don’t believe me? Ask Andy Van Esch of Valley BrakeRite in Chilliwack, B.C., or Dale Holman of Truck Watch Services in Georgetown, Ont. They’re brake experts who’ve seen first hand what can go wrong with our brake systems. They could tell you stories!

These two are having a difficult time selling their approach to monitoring and measuring brake performance. They can’t get anyone to listen because the fleet maintenance people are driven by their management to minimize brake-stroke violations. You can spend all the money in the world on stroke indicators but they’ll never tell you if there’s any stopping power at the end of that pushrod. And it’s not the stroke length that matters, anyway; it’s the amount of force applied to the wheel. Stroke is nothing more than a convenient way of determining whether or not the fleet is maintaining the vehicle.

So while we’re killing ourselves trying to comply with a relatively arbitrary regulation, there’s a young driver out there somewhere who can’t understand why her truck pulls to the left when she makes a modest brake application. One day, she’ll need to really stomp on the brake pedal, and her truck will take off across two or three lanes of oncoming traffic. It won’t be because her brakes were out of adjustment, but that none of the brakes on the right side of her truck were working, likely due to some bad plumbing.

Safety is big business in trucking. It’s our Achilles heel too. It’s our biggest perceived weakness, largely because we haven’t done a very good job of explaining the truth.

There’s another little wrinkle here as well: there’s a load of people whose careers would disappear if the industry took a common-sense approach to safety rather than a knee-jerk response to some bureaucratic micro-manager’s demands for a higher level of compliance. The fact is we’ve been kept too busy trying to comply to worry about explaining the braking realities. Personally, I’d prefer safe over compliant. And I’d welcome any opportunity to explain the difference to someone who doesn’t already understand this concept.