Our coverage of the CSA 2010 Behavior Analysis Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) continues today with Fatigued Driving (Hours of Service). Although the FMCSA announced an HOS waiver for drivers carrying freight to the Deep Water Oil Spill through May 14, transportation professionals should be ready for stricter enforcement when CSA 2010 rolls out in November.

As the second of seven Safety Measurement System BASICs, Fatigued Driving is defined as “Operation of CMVs by drivers who are ill, fatigued, or in non-compliance with the Hours-of-Service (HOS) regulations. This BASIC includes violations of regulations pertaining to logbooks as they relate to HOS requirements and the management of CMV driver fatigue.”

For the Fatigued Driving BASIC, violations are broken into five groups, with each error weighted based on its relationship to crash risk (1 – 10, low to high). The five groups with sample violations and their corresponding scores are listed below:

Hours

Requiring or permitting driver to drive more than 11 hours: 7

State/Local Hours of Service (HOS): 7

Jumping OOS/Driving Fatigued

Operating a CMV while ill/fatigued: 10

Incomplete/Wrong Log

No driver’s record of duty status: 5

Driver’s record of duty status not current: 7

Other Log/Form & Manner

Failure to meet requirement for recording daily miles traveled: 2

Failure to list main office address in duty status records: 2

False Log

False report of driver’s record of duty status: 7

Unlike the Unsafe Driving BASIC, which is simply weighted by the time since each violation occurred, weighting for Fatigued Driving is calculated using an equation that compares the:

• Number of violations,
• Time since their occurrence,
• Severity of each violation, and
• Number of relevant inspections. 

The calculation is applied to each of a carrier’s drivers, and the combined scores are used to organize carriers into Peer Group Categories. The higher a carrier’s score, the greater likelihood their drivers will be scrutinized at inspections.

Although drivers may not carry the points for their violations right now, watch out for carriers that want you to push HOS. Because, in the end, as hiring practices tighten, every violation you have could cost you jobs in the long run.

Do you think this arrangement is fair?

Have you ever experienced a carrier who forced you to violate HOS?