truck drivers

Why Trucking Needs to Take Extra Care During ‘Friday Night Lights’

By: Steve Vaughn, senior vice president of field operations, PrePass Safety Alliance You may recall the 2004 movie “Friday Night Lights” or the 2006-2011 TV series of the same name. According to its producers, “Friday Night Lights” depicted the “intense and sometimes extreme culture of high school football in small

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FMCSA to Gather Data about Truck Driver Detention and Truck Maintenance

Two notices recently published in the Federal Register may provide clues to where the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is heading on important trucking regulations: driver detention and truck maintenance. These notices, known formally as Information Collection Requests (ICR) are required any time a federal agency looks to access

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Taking Control of Speeding in Your Truck Fleet

By: Steve Vaughn, senior vice president of field operations, PrePass Safety Alliance “It’s all about control.” That’s what I hear from frustrated fleet managers and their professional drivers – the government is trying to control our every action. Take the speed limiter proposal, they say. “It’s the government bureaucrats, most

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The Trucking Lawsuit Problem and How to Fix It

“Nuclear verdicts.” “Reptile courtroom tactics.” Billboard attorneys are assaulting the trucking industry through litigation, with multi-million-dollar awards becoming more and more common. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) documents and studies the impact of litigation on trucking, tracking both large and small but numerous verdicts. Now the U.S. Chamber of

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Urinalysis Fails to Catch Most Truck Driver Drug Use

A multiyear study commissioned by 10 major trucking companies concludes that urinalysis, the drug-testing method sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) for truck drivers, fails to identify about 90% of actual drug use. The study by the University of Central Arkansas compared more than 936,000 truck driver pre-employment

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Coming Down the Pike: Updated Trucking Regulatory Agenda

What’s on the minds of federal trucking regulators? A look at the latest Unified Regulatory Agenda provides some clues. The Unified Regulatory Agenda displays the anticipated regulatory activity by departments and agencies across the federal government. “Anticipated” is a key word, as the dates shown for agency actions often slip.

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Can You Pass This Trucking Speed Quiz?

By: Steve Vaughn, senior vice president of field operations, PrePass Safety Alliance Commercial law enforcement in North America focuses on unsafe behavior by car and truck drivers. The most frequent reason enforcement pulls drivers over? Speeding. As a fleet manager or truck driver, you know that speeding can lead to

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FMCSA Finalizes Guidance on Freight Brokerage Definitions

Are you working with a broker, a bona fide agent, or a dispatch service? As a motor carrier, who you choose as a business partner can have legal and financial repercussions. That, in part, motivated the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to issue its final guidance on the definitions

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PrePass Insider Newsletter – June 2023

The PrePass Insider newsletter is your monthly digest of trucking news and everything PrePass. Not subscribed to this newsletter? Subscribe now. The Beginning of the End for Trucks Waiting at Red Lights? How many times have you or one of your trucks been making great time for a pickup or delivery

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FMCSA Study Dives Deep into Truck Crash Causes

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is undertaking a new study of the causes behind commercial motor vehicle (CMV) crashes. The agency released the last such study in 2006, based on data from 2001-2003. In the Infrastructure Bill signed into law in late 2021, Congress directed FMCSA to conduct

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Why Truckers Need to Be Alert for Roadway Flooding

By: Steve Vaughn, senior vice president of field operations, PrePass Safety Alliance We will all remember the winter of 2022/2023. Snow fell in sunny Southern California. Yosemite National Park recorded 15 feet of the white stuff. Storms labeled “atmospheric rivers” pummeled large portions of the country. Tornadoes hit the South

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New FMCSA Hours of Service Data Muddled by COVID-19

About three years ago, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) published final rules that contained four modifications to federal hours of service (HOS) rules for truck drivers: Short-haul exception – Expanded the short-haul exception from 100 air-miles to 150 air-miles for commercial driver’s license (CDL) holders and allowed a

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