Freight News:
Where recruiting meets compliance — Taking the Hire Road
Driver safety is an important topic in the trucking industry. Large trucks can face unique safety challenges, and many accidents and injuries are preventable if the truck drivers are following certain safety procedures. Despite the driver’s responsibility to follow safety procedures, it should start with the fleets. Every fleet needs to ensure proper safety measures are in place during training, before a driver ever gets behind the wheel.
Trucksafe Consulting helps fleets develop innovative safety programs to minimize highway accidents through its Trucksafe Academy. Trucksafe Academy provides online Department of Transportation compliance training courses, covering topics such as driver qualification, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, DOT enforcement, safety audits and much more. The courses are directed toward business owners, safety team members and drivers.
Drug testing is one of the important topics. According to Brandon Wiseman, founder and president of Trucksafe Consulting, some changes are being made to the driver drug testing policy.
“There is a proposed rule out there that would allow not just urine analysis for drug tests but also mouth swabs, with the idea being to make it easier to administer the tests and to make sure all tests are being observed, which can cut down some of the current issues where these things aren’t happening like they should be,” Wiseman said.
Wiseman believes there could be more changes to come.
“I think we will see a lot of focus on infrastructure, like parking and other things, as well as a big emphasis on the driver shortage, which is why we may see more of a push toward the Safe Driver Apprenticeship Pilot Program to bring in more young drivers,” Wiseman said.
The Safe Driver Apprenticeship Pilot Program could lead to reducing the minimum age for interstate drivers from 21 years of age to 18 in an effort to combat the driver shortage.
“Those who oppose lowering the minimum age will point to younger drivers being more likely to be involved in accidents as justification for keeping the age limit where it’s at,” Wiseman said. “On the other hand, most states have, for many years, authorized younger drivers to operate, but only in intrastate commerce. It seems to me that we should already have plenty of data out there from those operations to combat the other side.”
About our sponsor
Branch improves driver hiring and loyalty by delivering payments to drivers within seconds—any time, any day, even nights and weekends. Ditch outdated processes and get started for free at branchapp.com
Click for more FreightWaves content by Britni Chisenall.
More from Taking the Hire Road:
Engaging with higher-quality driver leads
Leveraging technology to improve the driver-life-cycle
Source: freightwaves - Where recruiting meets compliance — Taking the Hire Road
Editor: Britni Chisenall