During a lull at a truck inspection station in rural Florida, I took a drive a few miles up the road. It wouldn't take much guesswork to figure out what I saw. Trucks. Lots of trucks. Some pulled over the side of the road. Others getting off at exits that had little discernible lure for commercial traffic.
They were doing whatever they could to avoid inspections. They were driving down tiny main streets, past scattered homes. They trundled by schools and farms. You could hear them speaking on CB radio about the best way to navigate the back roads so they could pop back on the interstate, past the inspectors. Some would play possum by pulling into a parking lot, waiting for the inspection station to close.
Welcome to one of the things you won't see when you look at truck inspection data. When trucks are inspected, one of five is pulled out of service. A lot of the time it's for brakes that won't work right when there's an emergency; stuff that leads to accidents. When you see trucks pulling off the road to avoid inspections, you know there are a lot of inspections that never happen. That one-out-of-five figure is only a baseline.
Dateline NBC obtained more than a dozen databases to examine the problems with trucking safety. These included federal and state databases on accidents, inspections, truck carrier profiles, safety ratings and enforcement actions. The sources included the U.S. Office of Motor Carriers (now called the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration), the National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and transportation and public safety agencies in several states, including Florida, Missouri, Texas and California.
The reason we undertook such a thorough approach was to overcome some of the incompleteness and unreliability that happen if you relied solely on one of these databases. The result allowed the news magazine to more fully document the problems in trucking safety, in a story produced by Lynn Keller with correspondent Steve Daniels. It documented how many trucking companies systematically ignored safety rules and put bad trucks on the road, and how regulators fall short monitoring them.
Studies and reports
A starting point for our work was collecting various reports and studies that had been done on trucking safety, to establish sound methodologies. It also helped us gauge how well different states handle truck safety. California, for instance, is much better than Arkansas.
The simplest analysis was tracking which companies had unusually high out of service rates when their trucks were inspected. This is where having state data becomes important. Federal truck inspection data is only required to include interstate carriers. One in ten trucks on the road are intrastate truckers. They aren't licensed to go into other states. So their inspection records are not included in federal databases even if they are part of a subsidiary that's an interstate carrier. These trucks tend to face less scrutiny. It's also one of the things you won't see when you check a company's history off the U.S. Department of Transportation's web site (www.safersys.org).
Some states offer far more details in their inspection and accident data. Those additional columns of data may tell you more about the driver or more easily identify a particular truck. The federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System is also good for double-checking truck accident data.
Safety scores
Several of these databases were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and state open records laws. The most significant victory was a FOIA request that Dateline NBC won, on appeal, with the U.S. Office of Motor Carriers. We were the first news organization to obtain a recently developed database known as SafeStat, short for the Motor Carrier Safety Status Measurement System. It's worth getting, and should be easy to obtain for any news organization seeking it these days.
SafeStat includes numerical grades on the safety of trucking companies. The scores are on a sliding scale, and allow you to compare different companies with scores for four areas: driver, vehicle, accident and safety management.
Dateline NBC used the FOIA to also obtain the safety classifications kept by federal regulators in a separate, older system, as part of the federal motor carrier census. These are three letter grades - satisfactory, conditional and unsatisfactory. Just like the statistics books tell you, there's a lot of subtlety that's lost when data is categorical. Out of service rates, accident rates and SafeStat scores give you a much better sense of how much safer one trucking company is versus another. That sense of proportion is lost when information is telescoped into three grades.
But the older three-grade system is still worth a look. The grades are one more way to cross-check the different rates. It also gives you a sense of a company's history. Very few are unsatisfactory. But experts say that in this somewhat lenient system, keep your eye on trends. If a company is unable to maintain a satisfactory grade consistently over the years - say, it goes from unsatisfactory to satisfactory to conditional and then again conditional - it's worth checking out.
One way we used SPSS was to run a linear regression comparing the size of truck companies versus their serious accident rate, then comparing companies against like competitors. Reporters should look for outliers - which companies have higher than expected accident rates. (There is much in the literature on using numbers of trucks versus miles traveled, generally a less reliable number. Reporters should be aware of these factors, run the data both ways, and compare results).
Mapping
We used mapping software several ways. Perhaps the most interesting was plotting accident and inspection data to figure out which inspection stations we wanted to visit, to see how regulators handled their workload and dealt with companies that had a pattern of problems. That meant we were there when a military munitions truck was pulled out of service for not being safe to drive.
Mapping also helped us analyze whether a trucking company was inspected more in certain states, and whether those states had lax or stringent inspections. One large trucking carrier, for instance, scored well in its home state, and usually scored much worse elsewhere in the country.
Having all this data allowed us to challenge trucking industry claims about safety. We knew which companies' paper records for on-site inspections we wanted to obtain. Enforcement data helped underscore the contrast between the problems on the roadways and the declining actions taken by regulators.
The data also helped us make sure we had a strong reason for highlighting the different companies and accidents that were profiled in the story.
Andy Lehren can be reached by e-mail at alehren@nbc.com
The Dateline NBC story, "Truck Stop," is available on videocassette, story #16152.