Clark Freight Lines, with 180 trucks, used to routinely file lots of DataQs RDRs (Requests for Data Review) but met with little success, said Vice President Danny Schnautz. He gave the example of a violation for an air leak that wasn’t in fact a safety violation.
“What we found out was it made the police department really mad,” he said, particularly when the challenge was filed with little in the way of hard evidence. “Now we don’t dispute it unless we have real proof.”
Depending on what the violation is, and how attentive to the allegation any individual operator was during the inspection, such well-backed cases might be few and far between. Even photographic proof, sometimes, doesn’t do the trick if it’s less than conclusive, Schnautz said.