Brake Safety Week for the CVSA (Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance) is scheduled for the week of September 15th-21st, 2019. This week, North American commercial vehicles will undergo roadside safety checks. No one will allow vehicles with serious brake or inspection violations on the road unless they repair them. CVSA decals indicate that a vehicle has successfully passed inspection if it doesn’t have any serious inspection item violations.
Subsequently, after Int’l Road Check and a few months following Safe Driver Week (7/14-7/20), nationwide inspections come into effect. During the Roadcheck, police officers stopped thousands of CMVs to check for suspension and steering violations.
Inspectors during the 2019 Brake Safety Week will pay close attention to tubing and brake hoses. Furthermore, CVSA pays closer attention to tubing & brake hoses, given their importance.
Routine brake system replacement & inspections are part of Vector’s fleet maintenance, important for CMV safety. Commercial vehicles contain brake systems that include components that work simultaneously to stop and slow the vehicle. Consequently, they must be flexibly appropriate, checked for leaks, inspected for damage, and attached properly in order for these systems to operate properly. When these components fail, the rest of the braking system could experience problems as a result.
Jay Thompson, the President of CVSA and Chief of the Arkansas Highway Police Department says,
“We all recognize how significant an effective brake system is to vehicle operation. Each component of the brake system must always be in good working condition. Brake systems and their components and parts must be checked routinely and consistently and carefully maintained to ensure the safety and health of the whole vehicle.”
Brake system violations and brakes that were out of adjustment accounted for about 45% of the vehicle violations that were issued during the 3-day International Road check campaign in 2018. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA, mentions in their 2018 Pocket Guide to Bus and Large Truck Statistics that brake violations were ranked number 6 out of 20 of the most commonly cited vehicle violations for all of 2017.
14 jurisdictions are using performance–based brake testers. These tools will measure the efficiency of vehicle braking. Performance–based brake testers determine a vehicle‘s braking efficiency (total force/gross weight). For combinations or trucks with a weight rating of over 10,000 pounds, the minimum necessary braking efficiency is around 43.5% as required by § 393.52 of the CVSA’s North American Standard Out-of-Service Criterion and the United States Federal Motor Carrier Protection Protocols.
Enforcement, inspections, awareness, and outreach efforts are being put forth to educate owner–operators, mechanics, motor carriers, and drivers on brake maintenance, performance, and operation for the safety initiative to succeed.
Vector‘s fleet maintenance program and Brake Safety Week strive to reduce the number of crashes caused by defective brake systems on commercial vehicles. We conduct roadside inspections to identify and remove any unsafe commercial vehicles from our roads.
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