As a motor carrier, you’re probably familiar with the FMCSA, and by extension, you know about the Safety Measurement System (SMS). You know that the FMCSA oversees motor carriers and safety. They intervene with carriers when their safety record gets below a certain standard. But as a motor carrier, you might wonder when the SMS stops identifying a carrier for intervention. We’ll explain what the SMS is, how it gets its data, and when they stop intervention.
Trucking involves a lot of inspections from the DOT. That is just a fact. The DOT is going to conduct inspections on your vehicles, and those inspections are going to drive your DOT scores. This can have bigger effects than might be immediately apparent. It all comes back to your truck insurance rates.
Truckers are subject to many rules, and one of the latest regulations to make a buzz in the trucking world is ELDs. The ELD rule is a big deal, and though it’s been in effect for a while now you might still have some questions about it. What is the rule? Does it affect you? And, well, what exactly is an ELD? We’ve put together some of the “need-to-know” information about ELDs.
The FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) is tasked with keeping the roads safe, and they regulate motor carriers and commercial vehicles. Since they’re focused on upholding safety standards, they’re able to intervene if those standards aren’t being met. There are different ways that they can intervene, but one intervention method is a warning letter. If you’ve received an FMCSA warning letter, your first instinct might be to panic. But – what exactly are you supposed to do about it? What does it mean? We’ll explain what you need to know about that warning letter and other types of intervention.
When you work in trucking, you’re subject to many, many regulations. The goal of these regulations is to keep the roads safe for all drivers – CMV drivers and passenger cars alike. That’s the reason that the SMS (Safety Measurement System) exists. It’s a way for the FMCSA to keep track of a motor carrier’s safety record. How do they do this? They use data from different sources and organize it into seven different categories, called BASICs. We’ll go into more detail.
When it comes to trucking, there’s a lot of “paperwork” (rather, forms and such) to take care of. One big thing that you need to take care of is your USDOT Number. It might seem a little overwhelming to deal with your USDOT Number, so we’re going to break things down for you.
The main questions we’ll cover are:
If you’re in the trucking industry, the possibility of having an accident is probably a very real fear. Crazy things happen on the road all the time, and driving a truck is not easy. In the course of a split second, what started out as a normal drive can take a horrible (metaphorical) turn and become a bit of a disaster. We’re going to explore one such story. It involves a tanker truck and some milk.
No truck driver wants to consider the possibility of their rig bursting into flames. But, unfortunately, it happens. Fire can be very destructive, and it can gobble up a truck with no problem. The thought of your loyal truck on fire is a scary one. But that’s exactly what happened to four truck drivers last week at an Indiana truck stop.
Last week, Oklahoma and Texas experienced some extreme weather – to put it mildly. There were high winds reaching sustained speeds of 67 miles per hour, and the highest wind gust clocked 84 miles per hour. The wind in Texas was so strong that it ripped trees from the ground, downed powerlines, blew roofs off of houses, and damaged buildings.
It even toppled a few semi-trucks, this one among them.
If you’re a trucker, you face a lot of risks. Some of them are pretty apparent – getting into an accident, facing severe weather, something going wrong with the truck itself. But one risk that might not be so clear is the loss of your cargo. For-hire truckers don’t own the cargo they’re hauling, and that means that their standard liability policies may not cover the load they’re transporting if something happens to it en route to its destination. Cargo can be very valuable, and you might be responsible for very high losses if your cargo is damaged. (Not to mention that your relationship with your clients could be damaged.) That’s where cargo insurance can come to the rescue. We’ll explain how cargo insurance works.
