A new report compiled by software engineering and data mining firm Vigillo LLC determined that there is an ongoing “enforcement disparity” by county and state when it comes to Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) inspections.
Steven Bryan, Vigillo’s CEO, noted that the report – entitled Comprehensive State Enforcement Statistics – is a comparative analysis of inspections, violations and crashes for the 48 contiguous U.S. states, drilled down to the county level and normalized by the number of commercial vehicle miles traveled.
“We’d been hearing from many of our customers that they’d experienced an ‘inconsistent’ level of enforcement across the states they operate in,” Bryan told Fleet Owner. “It’s been an issue with CSA for a while but it really began heating up this summer in our conversations with customers, so we decided to really dig into the inspection data to see what was going on.”
In “peeling back” CSA inspection level down to the county level, Vigillo’s engineers discovered what Bryan called “interesting” trends.
“For example, we found that state-level data indicated Arizona wrote up the most violations for ‘non-English speaking’ drivers,” he said. “But in drilling down into the data, we found 99% of those violation write-ups occurred in just Pima County, which sits right on the border with Mexico.”
Thus carriers should use such a data finding to ensure that any drivers they send to or around Pima County should speak English well, Bryan noted.
Another finding: Vigillo’s data analysis determined that Cecil County, Maryland, was home to the most tire tread violation write-ups in that state – again, another data point carriers operating in that area should share with their personnel, Bryan said.
“This is the kind of information fleets should make all their operations personnel – drivers, dispatchers, and load planners – aware of if they operate in those areas,” he added, noting that it’s also something carriers should share with shippers, especially in the case of explained why enforcement activity might result in delayed shipments.
“Let me stress though: we’re not saying that those counties are deliberately placing an over-emphasis on those particular enforcement activities; this is simply reporting inspection data tied by GPS data to specific locations, which can even be drilled down to specific officer badge number,” Bryan cautioned.
“It’s just important for every carrier to understand what they’re facing in the area in which they operate,” he stressed. “Since this is a federal program, ideally enforcement should be uniform across the states, but the report will reveal that unfortunately that is not necessarily the case.”
Vigillo plans to hold a webinar in the near future to discuss more finding from its report and how carriers can best use the data. The date for that webinar will be announced on the firm’s blog site.
