January 21, 2021
USDOT Appointments Announced Written by Marybeth Luczak, Executive Editor
The Biden Administration has appointed 39 key members of the U.S. Department of Transportation, with more to come. Among them are Amit Bose, Deputy Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and Nuria Fernandez, Deputy Administrator of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). Both have held the positions previously.
Amit Bose, most recently Associate Vice President and Program Director at consulting firm HNTB, also served FRA as Chief Counsel. He was involved in the Northeast Corridor Gateway Program, California High Speed Rail Project, Northeast Corridor Future, Southeast Passenger Rail and Build America Bureau.
An audit of FMCSA s National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners found that the agency has not met oversight requirements, partly due to a seven-month outage of the database.
Jan 19, 2021
The seven-month outage of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners in late 2017 and half of 2018 has limited the agency s ability to properly oversee its medical certificate program due to missing driver records and outdated medical examiner credentials, according to the U.S. DOT’s Office of Inspector General, who this month released the results of an audit of the program.
Without proper oversight, OIG says FMCSA could be missing medical certificate fraud indicators or other risks, and has less assurance that drivers are physically qualified to drive a commercial vehicle. Without fully implementing its requirements for monitoring medical examiner eligibility and performance, including a representative sample of driver examinations, FMCSA may be missing fraud indicators or other risks that may require mitigation, OIG says.
Jan 18, 2021
For the past two years, Liquid Trucking’s plans for growth have been stunted by unforeseen events that lend credence to a centuries-old warning in Shakespeare’s
Julius
Caesar: “Beware the Ides of March.”
In March of 2019, heavy rains in Nebraska and other Midwestern states caused flooding of the Missouri River and its tributaries. Faced with imminent danger, the owners of Liquid Trucking had 12 hours to evacuate the property near the Platte river in Plattsmouth, Neb.
Some areas of the property were under 10 feet of water for several days. Despite this setback, Liquid Trucking entered 2020 with momentum only to be hit by a different type of storm in mid-March from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jan 12, 2021
Mileage has traditionally been used by truckload carriers as the basis for pricing loads, billing customers and paying drivers. In this low-margin industry, however, time has always been the more important denominator.
ELDs have been the impetus for motor carriers moving to time-based driver pay models.
Increasingly, motor carriers are converting to time-based measurements to create alignment between these critical business processes. As part of this effort many are using their data and information systems to create hourly and salary driver pay models.
Electronic logging devices (ELDs) were the impetus of this change by creating operational visibility of where time and money is being wasted. Beyond ensuring drivers are complying with hours-of-service rules, the technology captures a minute-by-minute record of the 14-hour duty cycle to see where time is used on productive and non-productive activities.