Anonymous

July 5, 2010 Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration United States Department of Transportation Enforcement and Compliance Division (MC-ECE) 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20590 Subject: Safety Regulations, Container Chassis Dear Sir or Madam; I am writing this letter anonymously as I am an intermodal driver for a local motor carrier in the Denver, Colorado area and am in the IANA Driver Database. I do not wish to impact any of my daily relationships by having it known that I expressed my thoughts to your office. The new Safety Regulations for Container Chassis’ are a much needed safety improvement but I would like to offer several thoughts as to why they will probably not work as your Department has planned. Being an inland driver I am unfamiliar with seaport container operations but in Denver and other inland cities loaded containers are primarily received from railroad intermodal terminals. The inbound container is either loaded on a steamship line’s proprietary chassis or a pool chassis. A few intermodal motor carriers have their own chassis. The basic premise of the new regulations is that the Intermodal Driver will be able to inspect the chassis when outbound from the rail carrier and then upon finding a safety failure will report this to the rail carrier so that the chassis may either be repaired or the container switched to another chassis. The basic fallacy in this plan is that the motor carrier is being made the goat in this process. The railroad has no responsibility to do anything on a timely basis. Most rail intermodal yards are managed by contractors. They are not mentioned in this new regulation. If a driver such as myself were to report a safety problem the rail operator would then have to report the malfunction to either the local chassis pool manager who would then have to contact his chosen maintenance vendor or the rail terminal intermodal operator would have to report the malfunction to the steamship line which would then have to contact their chosen local maintenance company. Or barring either of these two options, if there was another chassis available from the same IEP then the rail yard would be able to lift the container from the malfunctioning chassis to another chassis. The economics of this is that the driver is generally paid on some type of commission arrangement. When the driver is looking at a delay of as much 5 or 6 hours with no pay, an angry receiving customer and an upset employer he will opt for the easy way out and unless the chassis is lying on its side with five of eight tires missing, etc., the driver will pull this load on the existing chassis. There is no incentive on the part of the pool operator, the steamship line or the rail terminal operator to hasten the repair process and unless your regulation places some type of incentive (downtime, delay limits, pre-inspection, etc.) the movement of substandard safety container chassis will continue much the same as it always has. Your regulations place the onus on the wrong end of the transaction. The party with the least financial incentive to withstand the delay is the intermodal driver. The second party with the least financial incentive is the motor carrier. Rates for transportation of intermodal containers are at an all time low with many carriers (who use mostly owner operators contractors) only a short breath away from financial ruin. To confuse the issue even more is the chassis return. Chassis are generally either returned to the railroad terminal where received or to a storage yard contracted to the steamship company. If upon return of the chassis the driver or the motor carrier were to then report a safety malfunction this would mean that the driver and his controlling motor carrier had been operating an unsafe chassis. And again any such report would result in excessive delays for the reporting driver. I would respectfully suggest that you review these regulations and consider placing at least some of the onus for safety on the steamship lines, the pool operators and/or the rail terminal operators. Certainly the motor carrier must bear some of the responsibility for highway safety also but he cannot bear the total brunt of the cost of this regulation without some control on the other parties involved. In summary I, like most drivers, do not wish to operate any unsafe vehicle. My life is on the line where safety is concerned, but I will tell you in all honesty if I were to inspect every chassis with a jaundiced eye toward meeting the letter of your regulations and if I were then to turn down say one of every ten chassis’ it would only be a short time before I probably would have a very difficult time picking up a chassis at either of the major rail terminals in Denver. I would suggest also that the chassis pool manager and the major IEP’s would be chatting with my employer about why I was being employed as an intermodal contractor or driver! If your office desires more feedback on this or other intermodal/driver issues please contact me at denver.driver@yahoo.com Thank you for your time, I remain, Sincerely yours,