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Notes -
So is anyone planning on doing an effortpost on "Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC" that dropped last week?
Transport brokers lost immunity for hiring trucking companies with bad safety track records. It's causing some chaos and loops in the CDL and foreign driver discussion.
The important thing is that the trucking industry didn't prepare and because it came into full force immediately there's some chaos.
I'm asking because if someone with more legal and shipping knowledge than me does a write up, anything I write will look pretty half assed.
This should link to the twitter trend: https://x.com/i/trending/2055714473541771375
Possibly, if I have time (which has been in short supply lately), but I would have to do research and anything I produce is going to be half-assed. I dispatch for a mid-sized trucking that's a subsidiary of a larger company (meaning that they're very risk averse, as anything trucking screws up exposes the company as a whole to liability). I don't handle brokering.
The company I work for exclusively does tanking and (limited) hazmat tanking, so we're not really exposed to competition from the cardboard nameplate crowd. That said, compliance and litigation costs have been brutal in the last 5 years, as have been the effects of our efforts to enhance safety on driver retention. Fatalities aside, trucking companies have also been subject to the same issues as the rest of the auto industry in terms of property damage liability (Everything is expensive and costs more to repair.).
Fatal truck accidents were up something like 30% in the last 10 years as of 2024, but it's worth noting that overall accident fatalities spiked from 2020-2024, and only now do we have early estimate data for 2025 suggesting that we're back to the pre-pandemic trend (I wasn't able to find truck fatality data for 2025.). That said, while truck fatalities did spike during the pandemic and have fallen some since peaking in 2022, they were also increasing before the pandemic at the same time that car fatalities were falling, so it seems that truck fatalities are something of their own issue not strictly correlated with traffic fatalities as a whole (Note, much of the increase in traffic fatalities concerning cars has been from pedestrian deaths.).
Non-domiciled CDL holders (aka. foreign drivers) have been involved in a rash of high profile accidents, prompting a crackdown on non-domiciled CDLs, but the federal government doesn't track accident rates based on CDL type, so there is no data that presents a smoking gun suggestion that non-domiciled CDL holders have a higher crash rate than US citizen drivers.
This Supreme Court ruling stabs at a related but different and potentially more meaningful problem, so-called "chameleon carriers" and companies like Super Ego that hire them.
Which safety measures cause the most driver resistance?
Driver facing cameras: We don't have them, but even rumors about us getting them causes drivers to look for other jobs.
Most generally, "safety scores" generated by the on-board ELD that penalizes for things like speeding (mostly problematic on not always correctly mapped rural roads), harsh braking, following too closely (This one can be a pain in major cities.), etc. The company recently tightened up the guidelines without notice, applied them retroactively (much to the chagrin of operations), and cost a bunch of drivers their quarterly safety bonuses.
Thirdly, collision avoidance/lane departure tech on company trucks. Apparently these have a false trigger rate somewhere above zero. Of course, most of the drivers I hear from wish we'd go back to manual transmissions (I guess the ones who don't care/like the automatics aren't as vocal about it, but our drivers are also a fairly old bunch for the most part.).
Finally, I don't think drivers are seriously opposed to ELDs as a concept, but many of them have trouble working with the (rather bug prone, in my experience) tablets.
I wouldn't dismiss their concerns so quickly. The collision-avoidance "feature" on my Mitsubishi Mirage (just a beeping/flashing warning, not a newfangled one that brakes automatically) had something like one false positive per hour on the six-hour drive that I took earlier today (taking a non-Interstate scenic route, so maybe less relevant for truckers).
Honestly, I suspect that the drivers are right, and if it were up to me we'd buy manual transmissions and as little of that stuff as can be ordered. The non-safety electronics on these trucks are frequently unreliable trash, so why would the safety systems be any better? I say this as one of our brand new trucks with 30K miles on it randomly went into derate or something and had a sudden and complete loss of power going 65 miles an hour down the road this afternoon and is now dead on the side of the road waiting for a tow.
On a more broad perspective (including auto safety), I do find it discouraging that all this expensive technology has accomplished precisely nothing in terms of safety (at best, enabling keeping a worse class of driver on the road; I suppose one could argue that we'd have even more deaths without the new tech given the current state of drivers).
Speaking for myself, the only safety device I appreciate on newer cars is the backup cameras (They really do make parking a pickup truck easier.), and even that's compensating for the fact that cars are built like tanks these days with frequently poor outward visibility.
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