Who is Bass Ackwards… and what is he doing on my bus?

Be very afraid… after passing my DOT physical and self-certifying… I can continue serving as the bus industry’s “Bad Example”. My blood pressure was borderline, probably because I was dropping $90 on a physical only weeks after having one with my OWN doctor.

In ye olden days you could maintain your CDL without keeping a current physical. That allowed you to return to commercial driving by passing a medical exam.

Regular physical’s are good, but shouldn’t they be with your own doctor? (You know, the one who actually knows you).

Failing to self-certify makes your CDL revert to a car license. Returning to professional driving would presumably require going through the whole CDL process (and expense) regardless of your experience.

Best guess is that many folks who might return to commercial driving, or do it part time, figure it’s not worth the hassle.

There’s a serious shortage of motorcoach drivers. We’re regularly treated to studies that indicate if we just paid more, all would be well.

Everybody knows that.

The academics can’t tell us where the money would come from. Commercial drivers do a tough job, in a difficult environment, and deserve better pay.

Assuming that we’re compensating drivers the best we can afford, wouldn’t one way to mitigate the shortage be to remove silly irritants?

Maybe its just me, but it feels like a lot of new regulation is aimed at making enforcement easier, without actually improving safety.

Early studies on the effectiveness of ELD’s seem to indicate they HAVE had a small impact on safety… bass ackwards. Accidents are actually up a bit. Could that be, in part, because drivers become aggressive, knowing that their ELD will rat them out if they’re even minutes over HOS. Is it more dangerous to fudge a log book by 20 minutes, or drive like a kamikaze to beat the ELD?

I keep coming back to the story about the inspector who bragged about citing a driver for an HOS violation, after tricking him into admitting (gasp) that he was sleeping in his assigned bus. Gee whiz, you have to sleep in a different bus to be “off duty”.

Who knew that slumbering on the right bus was critical to safety? Do you think that hassling this poor guy was more likely to contribute to safety... or to the driver shortage?

Enforcement people who feel the need to find SOMETHING wrong every time they inspect a vehicle make life miserable for drivers. If it’s serious, by all means write it up. If it’s a minor defect that was probably OK when the vehicle left the garage, turn them loose and they may respect you.

Every job comes with a “worth it” factor. Is the compensation in money and satisfaction worth the effort and risk? Potential drivers have choices. Many have decided that the hassles involved with professional driving simply aren’t “worth it”.

Shorter columns use less paper (killing fewer trees), so I’ll ask you to imagine other bunk that’s piled on top of the already difficult task expected of drivers. One way to attract and keep good ones is to make it easier for them to do their jobs by cutting back on nonsense that accomplishes little.

Until we remove all but the essential stuff, we are not only going to be short of drivers, we’re going to have to retain marginal ones and recruit less qualified candidates.

Imagine a bussy “Trading Places” like the Ed Murphy/Dan Akroyd movie. If regulators were required to swap lives with coach drivers for a year, do you think there would be changes?