Dangerous Truckers
The system for getting them off the roads needs some work.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

ANATIONWIDE clearinghouse has long been in place requiring states to share information on the records of their commercial truck drivers. It's part of a bid to keep bad drivers off America's highways. That the system "worked" in the case of a trucker involved in a fatal Beltway crash is perhaps the best evidence that the system needs to be examined -- and strengthened.

Roger C. Scofield Jr. was behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer on March 19 when, police say, the vehicle crashed into the back of a car, then hit two other cars. One man died and two were injured. The investigation is continuing, so all the factors are not known. Before that crash, Mr. Scofield had, as reported by The Post's Candace Rondeaux, amassed numerous traffic citations, including for careless driving and speeding. Regulators in Delaware, which licensed Mr. Scofield, and other states where offenses occurred were aware of the problems and, in their defense, acted on them. His license was suspended for safety reasons several times. Indeed, the night of the accident in Prince George's County, Mr. Scofield was driving with a suspended license.

Federal authorities are right to investigate the claims of Mr. Scofield's employer that it was unaware of the suspension and many of the violations. Did the company perform its due diligence as required by law? Equally important, does this case expose flaws in the commercial driver's license system? The agency established to improve truck safety, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, has been criticized by safety advocates as well as the inspector general of the Transportation Department for chronic failures in improving and monitoring the program. While the agency showed great success in eradicating the problem of drivers using multiple licenses to shield violations, problems still exist. States get away with filing tardy, incomplete and faulty data, there are still opportunities for fraud in obtaining commercial driver's licenses, and testing and training standards need stiffening.

A federal advisory committee on commercial drivers is scheduled to meet this week, and it would do well to examine this case with a critical eye. That it is so easy -- in some cases automatic -- for suspended licenses to be restored is foolish. A driver with serious and serial suspensions is a danger, and so the standards for lifetime revocations of commercial licenses need to be reassessed. It shouldn't take a death on the highway for a dangerous driver to be taken off the roads for good. (By the way, a similar look probably should be taken in egregious cases involving non-commercial drivers.) There also are programs to be emulated, including innovative methods used in Maryland and California, that enable employers to monitor driving records much more frequently than the once-a-year requirement of federal law.

That there has been so little progress in reducing the number of people killed or hurt in big truck crashes each year argues for trying to fix a system that is still easy to game.