A potential federal regulation to track truckers poses constitutional concerns, and there’s no evidence so far that it would improve safety.
A potential federal regulation to track truckers poses constitutional concerns, and there’s no evidence so far that it would improve safety.
T he Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which regulates interstate trucking, is looking to place surveillance devices on commercial trucks for safety-monitoring purposes. The agency said in its notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register that such a move could “improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the roadside inspection program by more fully enabling enforcement agencies to focus their efforts at high-risk carriers and drivers.”
The move could require trucks to carry an electronic device that would allow safety inspectors to identify trucks in a given area. The problem, according to the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (a nonprofit membership organization of safety officials), is that there are not enough inspectors to adequately check the safety of the trucks on the road. An article from the trucking publication Fleet Owner says:
Of the government and industry professionals that make up the alliance, 13,000 are commercial motor vehicle inspectors, conducting an estimated four million inspections per year. FMCSA estimates there are 12 million large trucks and buses traveling the nation’s roadways. Inspectors must be highly selective of which vehicles they examine because, for every vehicle they stop, that means other, possibly higher-risk trucks could pass by without being inspected.
An electronic ID mandate would theoretically allow one-way wireless communication from vehicle to inspectors, allowing them to know the IDs of all trucks in their vicinity. That ID would then be used to identify not only the motor carrier but the specific vehicle. The inspector would be able to see the vehicle and carrier’s safety records. This would, according to CVSA, allow safety personnel to assess which trucks in their area are most likely to need safety inspections, letting inspectors focus on the highest-risk vehicles while allowing lower-risk vehicles to continue unperturbed. It would also, according to CVSA, encourage safety compliance by allowing carriers to avoid inspections, saving time and fuel.
If it were merely a matter of easing regulatory compliance, the case for this rule could be strong. The 2022 membership survey of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers’ Association (OOIDA), for example, found that complying with government regulation was the top challenge truck drivers face. But this proposal has more wrinkles.
As the Fleet Owner article notes, it’s not yet clear exactly what sort of technology the tracking devices would include. The CVSA is requesting one-way devices that would transmit only a truck’s DOT number to a nearby inspector, who could then evaluate the safety risk that truck poses by looking up its past records. The CVSA wanted the notice for proposed rulemaking from the FMCSA to allow for brainstorming during the comment period, the article says.
That comment period has commenced, and the OOIDA says that its members “oppose this proposal in the strongest possible terms.” It views it as yet another burdensome regulation for truckers to comply with and an unnecessary privacy intrusion.
The privacy concern was also raised by Institute for Justice attorney Jared McClain in a piece for Reason. McClain notes that the proposal presents serious Fourth Amendment concerns. “The Supreme Court has ruled that police must get a warrant — regardless of whether the subject of a search has a reasonable expectation of privacy — before they physically install a tracking device,” he writes. “The rule is no different just because the government forces people to purchase and install the tracking device on their own property.”
Both McClain and the OOIDA mention the overriding problem with the proposal: The FMCSA has provided no evidence to support the idea that such a tracking program would actually make roads safer. FMCSA data show that the fatality rate in crashes involving semitrucks was 1.84 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2020. That was lower than the rate of 1.90 in 2019, which means semitrucks did not experience the 2020 increase in the fatality rate that passenger cars did. The fatality rate in 1975 was 7.39, which indicates steady and significant progress in semitruck safety over the previous several decades.
Safety is an important concern, but it’s not the only concern, and trucking is already quite safe. Though Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg might believe it’s possible to eliminate all traffic deaths, we shouldn’t pretend that government can regulate its way to zero crashes. Without any evidence that this tracking program would make a difference in safety, regulators should avoid imposing additional burdens on trucking, which is facing enough burdens already. California’s A.B. 5 is already putting drivers there in an impossible spot, and the Biden administration is talking about making similar rules at the federal level. After praising the persistence of truckers as essential workers during the pandemic, politicians would be wise to follow up by stopping the regulatory onslaught the industry faces and allowing it to do its jobs with minimal government interference.