Avoiding DOT violations is harder than ever for truck drivers and trucking company owners.
The key to avoiding DOT violations is to avoid unwanted attention from law enforcement!
Sounds easy enough, right? I know it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Here, we’ll outline 5 of the most common DOT violations and share some actionable ways to avoid them.
We can all agree that DOT compliance is critical. But, complying with all the (ever expanding) Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) rules and regulations is virtually impossible.
The best that you can do is try to be as compliant as possible to have good CSA scores.
How To Win The Compliance Game
Flying under the FMCSA’s radar is the only way to win the DOT compliance game.
Owner operators tend to have things held down because they don’t have to worry about the DOT compliance of others. They can focus their own safety and compliance well.
Large fleets (those with maybe 50 or more trucks) usually have a full-time safety director or even a small team that is dedicated to FMCSA compliance and fleet safety. Even with those in place, the challenges are still monumental!
Every other company’s safety and compliance “program” ranges from nothing to totally squared away.
Our trucking compliance services program, My Safety Manager, provides a complete compliance solution for you!
Whatever your DOT compliance program looks like, avoiding just these 5 simple violations will 10X your safety and compliance.
You’ll notice two common things that all these violations share:
1) They are all easily identifiable by law enforcement officers.
2) They are all easy to prevent.
Learn more about upcoming changes to how the FMCSA will be calculating Unsafe Driving and other CSA scores in 2023 here.
Let’s get to the list:
Deadly DOT Violations 1: Lighting Violations
I promise that nothing will tank your CSA scores faster than lighting violations!
Over 588,000 lighting and reflective sheeting violations have been issued so far this year, making them the most common vehicle DOT violation.
These easy to spot DOT violations provide a wide-open invitation to all truck cops to visit with your driver on the side of the road for at least a Level 3 DOT inspection.
These common “gateway violations” provide officers the ability to find much less obvious violations with a driver’s electronic logging device or the truck or trailer’s brake system.
If they don’t pull you over in the first place, they can’t check those things!
Avoid lighting violations by simply checking your truck and trailer over maybe once a week.
Truck and trailer lights (especially the increasingly common LED lights) usually take a while to burn out. Simply doing a walk around inspection when it’s dark out will easily reveal these DOT violations. Finding out about a lighting issue during a Level 1 DOT inspection is way too late!
(This would also be a good time to do your daily tire inspection as well).
The rear of the trailer is a violation hot spot because that area has the most required lights and law enforcement can hang out behind a truck and get a good look there.
Smartphones provide a great way to “see” your equipment on a regular basis.
Remember to check your reflective sheeting as well!
Perhaps one of the most common reflective sheeting issues are the “Inverted L’s” that are required to be present on the top rear of a semi-trailer.
These tend to be missing or worn away more often and the truck cops like to focus in on those for an easy kill.
We do “Virtual Lighting Inspections” for all our My Safety Manager clients. This involves the driver taking a short video or 5 photos of the truck/trailer combo and sending them to our team for review. If we spot any violations, we’ll alert the owners or their maintenance team about what needs to be fixed.
There’s nothing stopping you from doing something similar in your fleet as well. Smartphones are a great way to “see” your equipment out in the wild!
If you want to go a step further, you can require that each of your trucks have a “mid-trip” inspection at a TA Petro, Pilot or Love’s truck stop location on a set schedule. Maybe once a quarter would work well.
These are designed to be a quick once around inspection. But, with anything vehicle maintenance related in a post-COVID world, experiences may vary wildly!
Some of our clients opt for having their trucks undergo a full annual DOT inspection once a quarter. This is possible to do, but it’s probably overkill.
Deadly DOT Violations 2: Seat Belt Violations
This is a no-brainer. But, for the life of us we can’t seem to get this one right 100% of the time.
In fact, over 42,000 truck drivers have been cited with these DOT violations so far this year. Most are the result of a Level 3 or Level 2 DOT inspection.
That’s only about 5% of the total vehicle violations issued. But these can be costly. Each one will cost you 7 CSA points in the Unsafe Driving BASIC category.
This could be a comfort issue or an independence issue. There could be any number of reasons why a truck driver chooses not to wear their seatbelt.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. These DOT violations should be non-negotiable with your drivers.
Telling your drivers “Be sure to buckle up” is about as effective as telling them not to speed. Unfortunately, this violation is often only detected after your driver receives a violation for it.
But that’s better than it being found after a crash.
The most effective way we’ve found to prevent these DOT violations is through onboard driver monitoring…aka rear facing truck cameras.
You may or may not like the idea of having cameras in your trucks. I understand. I sure as hell wouldn’t want anyone watching me work and having someone potentially criticize how I did my job.
But I’m not in charge of 80,000 lbs. of truck, trailer and cargo rolling down the highway either.
The unfortunate reality is that cameras are becoming increasingly common in trucks….and there are several good reasons for that. They are darn effective in detecting (and helping to prevent) more than a few bad driving behaviors.
Deadly DOT Violations 3: Speeding Violations
A truck or bus speeding down the road is like a truck driver painting a giant red target on the side of your trailer!
Speeding violations are the most common driver DOT violations and over 109,000 have been issued so far this year.
Truck cops, like all police officers, look for the low hanging fruit.
If your trucks have all of their lights working and they aren’t speeding, they tend to blend in with traffic and “disappear”.
This is the way.
Speeding is inherently dangerous and should be avoided whenever possible. Period. Hard Stop.
Side note: I think that speed limiters are stupid and won’t do a single thing to make the roads safer.
I would argue that most speeding happens in areas that have posted speeds well below even 65 mph. So, what good would limiting a truck to 65 mph do if they’re caught speeding at 62 mph in a 45-mph zone?
Speeding is a fact of life on the roadways in the United States. But it shouldn’t be the norm in your truck fleet.
I think that sometimes we all set the cruise control a few miles above the posted speed limit because we don’t want anyone (or any silly sign) telling us what we can and can’t do.
The problem is that we live in an increasingly lawsuit driven society. Being DOT compliant isn’t optional when juries are handing out million-dollar verdicts like people handing out candy on Halloween.
Don’t let your wallet be some plaintiff attorney’s next full size Twix bar!
Train your commercial drivers on speeding and space management.
Especially avoid speeding in construction work zones.
Make sure your drivers understand your expectations around driver safety and speeding.
Don’t tolerate these violations in your fleet.
Preventing Speeding Violations
Much like seat belt violations, an ounce of speeding prevention is worth many pounds of cure!
Both speeding and lighting violations are the most common cause of Level 3 DOT inspections.
Again, onboard driver monitoring is one of the most effective ways to manage speeding and prevent violations.
Instead of cameras, your electronic logging devices are usually enough to help here. All the popular ELD providers have a “safety suite” or some other similar upsell that they will provide to help you understand the speeds of your trucks.
If you’re not running ELDs, there are also companies that have a standalone GPS enabled device solution for this issue.
Unfortunately, having the information is only half of the battle. You need to make sure that you both record AND monitor your fleet’s speeding habits.
The ELD or GPS system can handle the data collection. But you have to have a system in place to review the information, analyze the data and then act on what you’ve found.
We manage these DOT violations as part of our services, but you don’t have to pay a DOT compliance company help with this.
Just make sure that you assign at least one person on your team to be responsible for reviewing your fleet’s speeding report on a regular basis.
I suggest doing this at least once per month. One time per week would be even better.
Sorry, just reviewing the information won’t quite do it here either. You must also make sure that your company acts when you learn about a driver with bad speeding habits too.
Corrective driver training, suspension for repeat offenses and even fines can be effective here.
Just be consistent and fair.
Deadly DOT Violations 4: Sign Violations
Failure to obey a traffic safety device violations (think running stop signs, red lights and being in the improper lane) are another common company killer.
Truck drivers received over 80,000 of these DOT violations so far this year. That is about 10% of all driver violations.
These violations are thankfully less common than the others on this list, but they are still very significant because they are so dangerous.
We’ve seen a spike in sign violations over the last few years. This is probably due to more law enforcement officers issuing violations for failure to obey a traffic safety device when trucks are driving in the left lanes on the Interstate instead of writing an improper lane violation.
Regardless of their motivation, this is wrong and if you receive a violation for this, I suggest submitting a DataQ request to try to have it changed.
Preventing Sign Violations
Preventing these types of violations is hard.
We all know that you shouldn’t run stop signs and red lights and that your drivers shouldn’t drive in the left lanes on the highway. These violations are usually a symptom of distracted driving rather than an intentional act.
So, preventing distracted driving is the key here.
Coach and train your drivers to:
- Avoid texting/using their cell phone while driving
- Avoid eating while driving, when possible
- Avoid improper lane changes
- Learn how to manage stale green light situations to avoid running red lights
We recently reviewed a video for one of our clients where their driver was talking on his handheld cell phone and blew right through a stop sign in the middle of a town. This was despite having a handful of warning signs on the approach and even rumble strips. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but this is unfortunately too common.
Deadly DOT Violations 5: Using A Cell Phone While Driving
These major violations carry the highest number of severity points (10 points) in the CSA system…and for good reason.
Law enforcement officers have issued over 14,500 of these violations so far this year. That’s only about 2% of all driver violations.
Not a huge number, but these are the ones who were caught with a phone in their hand. We know that the actual violations are far more widespread.
We’ve all heard about how dangerous texting or talking on a handheld cell phone is. Sometimes we’re just too stubborn for our own good and I’m not going to preach to you about this. So, let’s just jump right into the prevention part of the equation.
Preventing Cell Phone Violations
Like seat belt violations, the easiest and most effective way to prevent these DOT violations is to have driver-facing cameras in your trucks.
Again, you may not like that idea. That’s okay, I understand. There is usually a fair amount of push back from drivers around this and you may even feel like it’s too “big brother” for your company.
A Mini-Case Study
One of our large clients down near Tampa, FL didn’t think that they had an issue with drivers being on their phones either. None of their drivers had ever been issued a DOT violation for using a cell phone. Their CSA scores remained in good shape. No harm, no foul, right?
Not quite.
Since we started monitoring their new camera program for them, we’ve issued over two dozen warning letters for cell phone use. Each of those drivers have also completed our corrective action training module on proper cell phone use.
A couple have been suspended because of multiple violations and 2 drivers have even been terminated because of their unwillingness to put their phones down.
No plaintiff attorney is going to be able to successfully argue that we don’t care about cell phone use and that we’re not trying to prevent it from happening. Would you be able to say the same thing?
I’ve been there before and hope that you never have to find out.
Avoiding The “DOT Death Spiral”
There you go. 5 simple (but not easy) ways to prevent DOT violations that can and will kill your trucking company if you don’t manage them well.
I’m not kidding and when I say “kill” I mean it. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times.
I’ve coined a simple term for this. I call it “The DOT Death Spiral”.
Here’s what happens:
- Repeated Deadly DOT violations lead to higher CSA Scores and ISS-D Scores.
- This leads to more DOT Roadside Inspections and even more violations.
- Your high CSA scores will trigger a DOT audit which will likely result in receiving a Conditional Safety Rating and stiff DOT Fines.
- This will cause your insurance premiums to increase, and shippers/freight brokers will avoid working with your company.
- You’ll have access to less business opportunities as you’re forced to haul loads at lower rates.
- Quality drivers will leave, and you’ll have a hard time attracting new drivers to work with you.
- Combined, these factors will lead to unprofitability and will eventually kill your business.
Focus your safety and compliance efforts on controlling these 5 DOT violations and you’ll avoid the DOT Death Spiral.
DOT Violations FAQ
How Do I Look Up My DOT Violations?
If you want to do a DOT violations search, just check a transportation company’s public safety information. Make sure you have the trucking company’s name or DOT number and go to https://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/SMS/Search/Index.aspx.
Each company’s FMCSA CSA scores and DOT violations for the last 2 years is right there for everyone to see. Just click on the “See Your Data” button on the left side of the screen and scroll down.
How To Remove DOT Violations
We’re often asked, “How do I remove a DOT violation?” Here’s how to get rid of DOT violations:
1) Wait. All violations will be removed from a company’s safety record after 24 months.
2) Fighting the violation in court and then going through the FMCSA’s DataQ process to have it removed from your FMCSA SMS (Safety Measurement System) information.
3) Going through the DataQ process and providing evidence that the violation was incorrect (that the law enforcement officer was wrong or lying) or that the violation belonged to another company, etc.
That’s it. I’m not aware of any other ways.
Waiting is the only way that works 100% of the time.
Option 2 can be very expensive but is usually effective.
Option 3 can work, but you better have some solid evidence.
Wrapping Up
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other important parts of a high-quality safety and compliance system.
I’m also not saying that other DOT violations (preventing air brake system violations, HOS violations and tire violations come to mind easily) aren’t important.
Of course, you should also implement a solid drug testing and alcohol testing program and work towards being as DOT compliant as possible.
What I’m saying is that by avoiding these 5 specific violations, you can generally fly under the DOT’s radar.
This will give you the breathing room to operate well and to focus on improving all areas of your safety and compliance program.
Outside of simply operating a safer fleet by avoiding these DOT violations, doing so can literally save your company!
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No contracts, no enrollment fees, no other charges for things like drug tests, MVRs or PSP reports.
We would love to help your fleet be as compliant as possible. If you’re interested, just click here to find out more!
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