Guest Post by and thanks to Jeff Head. Friend him on Facebook!
I checked my CSA 2010 points yesterday. I was hoping that by now that I would have zero points showing. Not that I ever had any kind of big number, twelve being the highest it had ever been. No such luck though this time around. Remember that accident that I was involved in about a month ago. You know, the one where no one received any kind of a ticket because an object came out of nowhere, sailing through the air, taking out the windshield of a car. Once it hit the car and that driver knocked silly, lost control and in turn hit me in the rear and then another vehicle. You know the accident that the police report said that no one at the scene was at fault; no tickets issued. Well, just for the fact that I, an honest hard working person holding a CDL was there and while involved but not in any way at fault, I get six points added to my CSA record.
I do not get it, why would they want to do this to a person. Do they not know that we safe and legal truck drivers take great pride in keeping a perfect record? Do they not understand that they might just as well have keyed my brand new car and have received the same reaction to my moral, my pride? Why should I or anyone else give one flying flip about even trying to run legal if no matter how safe and legal we drive, they are going to ding us anyway. I did everything right that day including maneuvering my truck to save further damage and lives and they whack me with points against my record.
Now, for the umpteenth time, they are trying to force each truck on the road into using Electronic On Board Recorders again. So all they do with them as far as I can see is use the information to make even more safe and legal drivers into renegades. Maybe it is just me but the authorities have done a very poor job of enforcing needed regulations on the folks that continue to break the rules. All they are doing is creating an environment in which if you even so much as sneeze, you are in some way breaking some trucking rule and therefore should be treated as a killer trucker. I have news for them, I will run safe and save lives long before I run legal and kill someone. If that puts me out then so be it.
As things are now no one, not even God himself can maneuver through the minefields of this over regulated yet poorly enforced trucking hell that our government has created. They have slipped deep into a scorched earth policymaking mentality that they in some way hope will catch enough bad actors and remove them from the industry. Instead, all they are doing is destroying the moral of hard working safe and legal drivers like me. The renegades continue on ignoring the rules, nothing changes.
Maybe it is just me. Maybe I am a little off my rocker in this, but do you not think instead of dinging a driver for doing nothing wrong it might be an idea to maybe say, "Hey driver, great job handling you rig in a safe and professional way the other day." Heck, I would have been happy if no one said or done anything at all. That would at least have kept my perfect record intact and my moral as a driver on the up and up. People work hard to achieve these sorts of goals and to have that destroyed really kind of sucks. It will take three years to clear those points and at this point, I no longer really care. Why should I? If all it takes is for someone else to involve you to destroy your perfect record, then you have no control whatsoever. You cannot win; they will take you out regardless of how hard you try.
So I would like to thank the FMCSA and all their great work tonight for their efforts and their moral destroying regulations. I am quite sure that if they continue on this present path, that it will not be long at all before any reasonable person that wishes to stay within the law will realize that a trucking career will only destroy that goal. That no matter how hard one might try, that you will be dinged for following the rules even faster than if you just ignore them.
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