ORLANDO, Fla. — During the Truckload Carriers Association’s (TCA) annual convention, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) administrator Derek Barrs addressed the attendees about the core values of trucking and how FMCSA is revamping the system.
“What is the values of your drivers,” Barrs said. “What is the value of your companies? For me, it has to be faith, it has to be family, it has to be my community and responsibility and service. I have to live by those principles every single day as I go through and lead this organization. We have a lot of work to do. We’ve done a lot of work over the last few months, but that’s just the beginning of the things that we have planned and the things that we need to do to help clean up the mess that is inside this organ, inside this industry. And we all know that. But we have a great team that is working hard every single day to do that.”
Keeping America Moving
Barrs emphasized the importance of the trucking industry in keeping goods and services moving.
“You move freight that keeps store shelves stocked,” Barrs said. “It keeps a storage stopped factories running and families supplied. That responsibility is enormous and I thank you all so much for that.”
A Common Responsibility
Speaking to the drivers and companies in attendance, Barrs praised their dedication and highlighted the importance of safety.
“I want to thank you for your professionalism, your discipline and your consistency,” Barrs said. “A safety culture when taken seriously, produces measurable results. This drives what we need to see in every single organization. And protecting that standard is what brings us together. Because whether you’re running a fleet, managing compliance, leading a trade association or serving a federal or being a federal regulator like we are, we share a common responsibility protecting the lives of Americans on our roadways. For me, that responsibility is real. Before coming to FMCSA, I spent more than 30 years in law enforcement rising to the rank of chief of the Florida Highway Patrol. I’ve stood on highways in the middle of the night after the major event or a crash. I’ve seen the aftermath of that crash. And I’ve spoken to families like whose lives will change in an instant because of somebody’s stupidity. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Those are things that you can unsee in your life. So when I talk about reducing crashes, injuries and fatalities involving large trucks and buses, which is our mission at FMCSA, I’m not just speaking in general terms.”
Integrity Matters
“I’m speaking from experience,” Barrs said. “And that experience shapes how I lead this agency. It also shapes how I think about the partnerships with the industry that we have. Because I know this, the overwhelming majority of professional drivers and carriers out here, you take that responsibility serious as well. You operate with care, you represent your companies and you do it with pride. But when standards are weakened every, every single time that we see something that is weak, catastrophic things can happen. That’s why integrity matters.”
Fighting CDL Fraud
“We all understand or we should understand a that your CDL actually should mean something,” Barrs said. “And it shouldn’t be just because I went through a fly by night training school and I went and get a got a job with some fly by night company That that makes everything better. It does not. Your CDL should represent real training, real qualifications, real competency, and it must be issued in a way that is consistent resistant to fraud. And that brings me to several areas where FMCSA has taken deliberate action.”
English Language Proficiency
Barrs noted that English Language Proficiency is a key point that FMCSA is addressing, Specifically, the ability to read road signs, understand safety instructions and communicate effectively,”
“When that standard is applied inconsistently, it creates risk not only to the public, but to the professional drivers operating along alongside someone who may not fully understand their critical instructions,” Barrs said. “And I can tell you that’s difficult whenever you’re doing roadside inspections and nobody, and they can’t understand what you’re saying, we are ensuring this requirement is applied and written is applied as written, and it is as it is intended, not selectively, not unevenly, but consistently.”
Non-Domiciled CDLs
Barrs also spoke on the issue of non-domiciled CDLs.
“We identified inconsistencies in how certain states were issuing licenses,” Barrs said. “Of course that raised concerns about documentation, identity verification, whether federal standards were being applied uniformly across jurisdictions. So we strengthened safeguards, we clarified state expectations, we reinforce verification requirements because when loopholes exist, bad actors will find a way to get into them. As you all know. And when bad actors exploit the system, good carriers like yourself pay the price.”
Investing in Safety and Entry Level Driver Training
“You all invest in compliance, you invest in training, you invest in safety technologies,” Barrs said. “The regulatory system must protect the investment by ensuring a level play in field. And that brings me to what we need to be talking about even more. And that’s entry level driver training. Entry level driver training was established to ensure that individuals entered this profession, received meaningful instruction from legitimate providers before they ever sit behind the wheel of a commercial motor vehicle. But as we found out real quick, like after I got here, that that what a problem that we have, some providers were not meeting those standards. Some could not demonstrate that the training was even being delivered. So we’ve removed over 7,000 providers from the training registry as to date. And we have so many more that we are working towards right now on a consistent basis to remove these bad actors from our driver training schools. And to be honest with you, I would just assume as we go through and just clear all of them out and start all over again, we have a systematic problem here that we have to work through to ensure that we are pumping out and we are putting the right drivers behind the wheel of commercial motor vehicles who want to do it right and not circumventing the system.”
Drivers Deserve Real Preparation
“Training is where professionalism begins,” Barrs said. “It’s the foundation. If the foundation is weak, the structure above it is also compromised. Drivers deserve real preparation, not paper certification. Not just pushing them through. Cattle carriers deserve confidence that when you hire a newly licensed driver, the driver has been properly trained. Everyone traveling on local American roads deserve assurance that when someone earns a CDL, it represents real competency.
protect this industry. I would think it’s the best industry in this country. The truckload sector is too important to allow weak standards and there’s more work to be done.”
Registration Fraud
“We are confronting fraud in a registration system,” Barrs said. “We’re addressing shell entities and chameleon carriers. And there’s people that are in this room, without your help and without your ability and your want to be able to help us, I’m not sure we’d be able to make the progress that we’ve made. We are modernizing legacy data systems that are built decades ago. We were adapting to new technologies involving operational modes.”
Methodical Modernization
“This is critical work,” Barrs said. “It is ambitious, it’s complex, and we are approaching it methodically. And I use it layer by layer. We’re doing this and step by step. And a part of that modernization includes something that many of you have asked for for years, and that’s greater flexibility for hours of service. So FMCSA has launched two hours of service pilot program designed to evaluate whether additional flexibility can improve driver wellbeing and operational efficiency while maintaining safety. The first pilot [system] allows participating drivers to pause their 14 hour on-duty driving window for a period of ranging from 30 minutes to three hours. That could help drivers avoid congestion, wait on unsafe conditions or rest when fatigue without penalizing their clock. The second pilot explores additional sleeper birth time to six four or five five configuration to provide more adaptable rest periods.”
Using Real World Data to Drive Solutions
Barrs noted that the pilot programs allows FMCSA to use real-world data to provide real-word solutions.
“This is responsible data-driven evaluation and we will collect and analyze safety and fatigue and operational data for participants to determine whether these flexibilities enhance driver safety,” Barrs said. “And here’s where I need your help. We are currently recruiting 18 drivers for our initial phase of this effort. This is an opportunity for professional drivers to directly inform national policy, the real world experience and measurable data.”
Vetting ELDs
“We are readying up vetting of our electronic logging devices,” Barrs said. “We’ve removed over 80 ELDSsin the last six months that should not be on our system. We’ve had over 400 applicants to have to have new ELDs into the system. I’m not sure where all these people come from and we’ve not allowed the first one into the system through our own internal vetting process.”
Looking Ahead
“I hope that you’ll get the point that we have a lot of work to do at FMCSA,” Barrs said. “And I value and appreciate the partnership that we have with each and every one of you as we drive this industry forward. And we take the bad actors out so the good can prevail. We cannot forget the good folks in this industry. We cannot continuously say that we have bad, bad, bad because we have a lot of good that’s in this room that we need to make sure that we’re talking about that every single day. So our enforcement efforts will be able to take the bad out so the good will rise and the cream will come to the top. So thank you all very much for what you do for this industry and God bless you.”
Dana Guthrie is an award-winning journalist who has been featured in multiple newspapers, books and magazines across the globe. She is currently based in the Atlanta, Georgia, area.
