Roadcheck, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance's annual enforcement blitz, falls on May 16-18. Though as usual there have been some slight tweaks to the out-of-service criteria for drivers and trucks this year, a core piece of wisdom remains vital for owner-operators: Don't give them a reason to inspect you, and if you do get pulled in, know how to play it right.
In a perfect world, you might say, an all-hands-on-deck inspection event like Roadcheck, aimed at education as much as it is enforcement, might pull in a representative sampling of trucks and operators for inspection.
Yet In the real world, if your truck looks a little unkempt, or your attitude is a little gruff, inspectors like as will see it that a red flag increasing your chance of a real delay for a full Level 1 inspection, according to Jeremy Disbrow, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance's roadside inspection specialist. Disbrow was speaking Thursday's as part of a webinar on preventative maintenance practices to beat the inspection blitz, hosted by Overdrive sister publication CCJ.
For the owner-operator with places to be and clean inspections already on their record, sometimes Roadcheck is more of an obstacle to be avoided than a challenge to engage with.
"When I’m selecting a vehicle to inspect, I don’t want to waste time on vehicles that are going to be clean with no violations," Disbrow said. He joined CVSA last year after 25 years conducting plenty of inspections himself in Arizona. "It starts from when you're sitting in the median, watching traffic go by." Lights out, reflective tape missing -- "That’s going to attract my attention. When you notice little violations that are easy to fix not being fixed, it's usually indicative of bigger violations."
When an officer sees those little misses, they think either an owner "doesn't care and isn't doing a pretrip or hasn't been educated on how to do a pretrip," Disbrow added. Or, in the case of company drivers, "that the carrier knows about it because the driver reported it and the carrier isn't fixing it."
Furthermore, neither drivers or inspectors are robots, and attitude means a lot in these interactions.
