What's Wrong With This Picture?

Unregistered Carriers on 01/22/2009 - 1064
Unregistered Carriers on 01/25/2010 - 1068

Illinois - 95.05%
Maine - 93.40%

One of the really beautiful reports that comes out of UCR-Link is the Mail Merge report. I've talked about this report before, but I'll mention it again now as a precursor to today's comments.

The mail merge report is run against MCMIS and shows us all of the MCMIS records that are currently represented as "Active Interstate Carriers" - without regard to whether or not they fall into our "UCR Universe".

In Illinois, we show 11,400 motor carriers that are not in our UCR Universe, but which MCMIS shows as Active Interstate Carriers. This means that these records show a carrier as active, but these carriers show no record of an inspection, a crash, an MCS-150 update or a UCR registration in the past 15 months.

So, what's wrong with this picture?

If we went to the folks at FMCSA and said, "Well, apparently these carriers are inactive because you haven't heard from them or seen them, so let's deactivate them", FMCSA would have a cow! We all know that's true. And I would agree with them. But, at the same time, if we ask them to explain the status of these carriers, they would have to say they don't know ... because they literally don't know.

Apparently, between Washington, the FMCSA field office, CVISN, PRISM, MCSAP, IRP, and IFTA - all of the major motor carrier programs - we still have thousands of motor carrier records that nobody knows anything about. So, either we have tens of thousand of motor carriers operating "under the radar" (no pun intended), or we have a lot of data that is bogus and out-of-date. Our experience to date tells us that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Is this a problem? Only if your mission is motor carrier safety. How do you know these carriers are safe if you don't even know their current status ... or whereabouts?

I don't raise this issue to point any fingers. I raise this issue because I think there are holes in the data big enough to drive a truck through (darned, there I go again!) and because UCR is, in my opinion, the FMCSA's best hope for cleaning up their data. And, for anybody who wants to debate the issue, please don't tell me that putting more money into MCSAP (or any other program I listed) is going to remedy this problem. All of those programs are getting "long in the tooth" and we still have 100,000 (or more) motor carriers nationally whose status is basically a mystery. I call that a problem ... and I suspect that every FMCSA State Director lives in fear of one of these "mystery carriers" from their state getting in a nasty crash.

And, if you still don't see what's wrong with this picture ... I'm afraid I can't help you.