Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Executive Director Collin Mooney gave a wide-ranging interview to Canadian trucking publication Today’s Trucking, talking about how he views the organization's role in improving safety on our roads.

Mooney spoke about the disconnect between how trucking companies view some of the Alliance’s enforcement and what the CVSA is actually trying to accomplish. He found that the rollout of the ELD mandate in December from an enforcement perspective has not gone completely according to plan.

“We are disappointed that our implementation process — our delay in implementing Out-of-Service conditions until April 1 — has been taken by many in the industry as the new implementation date. That wasn’t the intent,” said Mooney. “I’m disappointed in the handful of people electing to install their ELDs so they meet the regulatory definition, but then still using paper. It’s not meeting the regulatory intent.”

On the subject of Out of Service violations, Mooney reflected on how the kinds of violations found during inspections often point to larger problems with carriers and how they might be failing to enforce their own safety rules.

“If we’re finding violations and documenting them at roadside, you have a failure within your annual inspection program, your preventive maintenance program, your driver trip inspection program,” he said. “Sometimes [truckers] rely on the roadside inspection program as their preventive maintenance program. We see that a lot, and that’s not right. The carriers that invest in a preventive maintenance program are at a competitive disadvantage when you have motor carriers that do not.”

Mooney also discussed the influx of new technologies such as weigh station bypass and ELDs and how increasing connectivity could help the CVSA cast a wider net when targeting unsafe carriers.

“The more we can leverage technologies such as weigh-in-motion, bypass systems — any sort of advancement in technology to help us target unsafe carriers — the better,” said Mooney. “We conduct 4 million roadside inspections annually in the United States and Canada. The goal under our electronic inspection program is 400 million a year.”

In the rest of the interview Mooney also speaks about CSA, the annual Roadcheck blitz, improving compliance, and what violations say about a trucking company. 

Read the full interview here at Today's Trucking.