FMCSA administrator seeks more partnerships with carriers, drivers

Scott Darling, acting administrator for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, shared some of the agency’s top priorities during a luncheon at the American Trucking Associations annual conference in Philadelphia.

He began by mentioning an announcement made last week about the 2015 recipients of its commercial motor vehicle safety training grants. The grants will be assisting military veterans and their spouses with careers in the trucking industry and expand the number of CDL holders with enhanced safety training.

“Our military skills waiver training program allows graduates who drove heavy duty vehicles in the military to obtain a commercial drivers license without taking the skills portion of the CDL test,” he said. More than 10,000 have taken advantage of the waiver to date.

Click here to see all of CCJ’s coverage from the American Trucking Association’s annual Management Conference and Exhibition. 

Looking toward 2016, he talked about a “year of partnerships” with motor carriers and drivers. One partnership started last December with the agency asking for carriers and drivers to provide data to assess the impact of the hours-of-service restart provisions.

More than 220 drivers provided the agency with data from their normal routes. The data included more than 3,000 driver duty cycles captured by electronic logs and more than 20,000 days of driver sleep data.

The study is currently in the analysis stage with a final report to be submitted to the Office of Inspector General in coming months.