Count the Crashes, Not Just the Arrests

In 48 hours at Arkansas weigh stations, officers ran 1,724 inspections. They put 393 drivers and trucks out of service, disqualified 183 drivers for English-language proficiency, wrote 369 citations or warnings and made 44 criminal arrests (Land Line). The same week, the Department of Homeland Security said its Operation Guardian, across 15 states, arrested more than 230 people, including more than 40 CDL holders (DHS).

Those numbers get a press conference. What they don't come with is the number that matters most to people who drive for a living: did any of this make the road safer?

Activity isn't outcome

Arkansas was the third wave of Operation Highway Shield this year. Florida's in March put 176 drivers out of service, 54 for "language deficiencies." August's, across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio, put 766 drivers and vehicles out of service. In September, Operation Saturday Night Fever sidelined 78 drivers and 25 vehicles (Land Line).

Every one of those is a count of things officers did. None is a count of crashes that didn't happen. That's not a knock on the officers. It's a gap in what gets reported.

And FMCSA knows it. Asked about the non-domiciled CDL and English-proficiency crackdowns, the agency's chief safety officer, Steve Dowling, acknowledged FMCSA needs more time and data to determine whether its enforcement initiatives are producing measurable reductions in crashes. "Sometimes you have to be patient to be able to see if the things that you are doing works," he said (FreightWaves).

That's an honest answer. It should also be a commitment.

Why drivers should want the data

The drivers most affected by a weigh-station blitz are the ones who pass. They wait in the same lines, get the same inspections and lose the same hours. Most of them support getting unsafe drivers off the road. OOIDA has called English proficiency a "life-and-death safety standard" (Land Line).

But support lasts longer when people can see results. If sweeps are cutting crashes on the corridors they work, publishing that would make the case better than any arrest total. If they aren't, FMCSA and the states should know before they spend the next round of overtime on the same approach.

Dowling himself pointed at the better tool: "We can get more predictive by data analysis on who is more likely to crash" (FreightWaves). Predictive targeting and outcome reporting go together. You can't tune one without the other.

What every sweep should publish

1. The full violation breakdown. Not just headline totals, but how many out-of-service orders were for the driver and how many for equipment, and which violations drove them.
2. A baseline. How the out-of-service rate during the sweep compares with normal inspections at the same sites. Without that, a big number could mean a big problem or just a big operation.
3. Follow-up crash data. Large-truck crash trends on the corridors worked, six and 12 months later, compared with similar corridors that weren't.
4. Separate safety results from immigration results. Immigration arrests and safety out-of-service orders are different measures. Reporting them in one bucket makes it harder to judge either.

The fair counterargument

Crash data takes time, and crashes have many causes. One sweep won't move a statewide number, and nobody should expect a clean before-and-after in a month. That's exactly why the reporting should be routine and built in from the start, not something assembled later to defend a program. Nobody is asking agencies to announce where the next sweep will be, either. Results can be published after the fact without tipping anyone off.

Enforcement that's aimed at safety should be able to show its work. Count the arrests if you want. Then count the crashes.