Originally published at: The driver involved in the 10-fatality Alabama crash is back in business and still crashing - FreightWaves
A dangerous driver is still in a truck with his own DOT number, operating under someone else’s authority.
The part about miles driven with the truck and comparing it to Swift is not correct. If a truck averages 2500 miles per week every week of the year, it equals out to about 130,000 per year. Swift operates a completely different business model than smaller fleets. Small fleets can not afford for a truck to sit in the yard, they fill those trucks up pretty fast and yes a lot of times with questionable drivers. So the driver pool might be questionable, but not the mileage calculations. We hire drivers that need to stay on the road for 2 weeks at a time and then at the end of second week, they get 3 full days off. So they are on the road 11 straight days, so if you divide 5000 miles by 11 days, that comes out to 455 miles per day, that is an 8 hour drive time, considering you do not load or unload every day, because of the longer hauls and you do maintenance of your truck when the driver is at home for those 3 days.
I’m not trying to discard as misinformation of what you are saying about shi**y drivers on the road, I’m all for being safer and removing the chameleon fleets, that destroyed our industry, but things are not black and white in transportation and comparing small fleet to Swift is an absolute wrong metric.
I didn’t even mention team driving and the miles are counted as fleets average.
How can a broker provide meaningful oversight of driver qualifications? I get carrier vetting is important but once a broker starts managing a carrier’s driver qualifications they cross the line into a employer - employee relationship.