The Trucking Alliance, which in terms of numbers is one of the smaller industry lobbying and support groups but which includes some of the bigger playetoprs in trucking, has long focused on safety issues in its efforts to shift public policy.
After a tumultuous 2025 in the intersection where trucking, safety and politics all came together in often unexpected ways, the group is laying out its agenda not just for 2026 but for years to come, freely acknowledging there are some shifts in the regulatory landscape that will take a few years to ferment and develop.
In this three-part joint video and editorial series, Freightwaves is presenting highlights of an interview editor at large John Kingston conducted with key members of the Trucking Alliance’s leadership team: Steve Williams, the co-founder and president of the Trucking Alliance, as well as the chairman and CEO of carrier Maverick USA; Lane Kidd, managing director at the Trucking Alliance; Greer Woodruff, executive vice president of safety, sustainability, and maintenance at J.B. Hunt Transport Services (NASDAQ: JBHT); and Brett Sant, senior vice president at Knight Swift (NYSE: KNX).
The full interview with the Trucking Alliance leaders can be found here.
Part one dealt with issues that would have their greatest impact on drivers in the cabs. Part two deals with suggested safety steps that would mostly need to be taken by carriers or have their greatest impact on them. Part three will be about broader regulatory changes. While separating out regulatory changes and declaring that they affect drivers or carriers is a somewhat futile pursuit–it’s all a connected ecosystem–these divisions can make it easier to keep track of the proposed changes.
Level 8 inspections
One of the Trucking Alliance’s proposed solutions to improving safety on the road is what it calls a Level 8 inspection program.
It would involve a wireless inspection, similar to what occurs with weigh station bypass programs like Drivewyze, where telematics coming off the truck would be recorded and analyzed for safety data.
In its white paper, the Trucking Alliance described the program.
“By integrating Level 8 data into safety scoring, DOT and the FMCSA can increase inspection coverage, reduce unnecessary roadside delays, and strengthen the integrity of CSA metrics.” the Alliance said. “The truck can communicate information, including Hours of Service and other information as they approach a weigh station, we can provide that data electronically, and the inspection station can either ask us to pull in or ask our driver to bypass that station.”
There is a pilot program ongoing between some Alliance members and FMCSA, which the group said is producing “good results.”
Woodruff said by in effect automating some portion of safety inspections, resources would be freed to monitor the safety conditions at other carriers. “We can pull in drivers who have insufficient data or who do not have a basic CSA score,” he said. “We should pull them in until they have sufficient data to generate a basic score. These changes would help ensure that more carriers are given a good look.”
Woodruff said the cost of a truck equipping itself with the necessary tools to produce data for that roadside inspection “is really not that expensive,” though he added that he did not want to quote a specific price.
But the systems used by so many trucks to avoid stopping at weigh stations, like PrePass and Drivewyze, shows that the technology can be adopted and cost is not a huge barrier, Woodruff said.
“When you look at the numbers that FMCSA has released, you quickly see that 90% of all the trucking companies operating on the nation’s highways do not have a federal safety rating,” Kidd said, expressed as a CSA score: compliance, safety accountability.
“Layer in the fact that those unrated carriers are engaged in 84% of the all the serious large truck crashes that involved fatalities and injuries,” Kidd said. “So if you do the math, a truck operated by an unrated carrier is nine times more likely to be in a crash than a truck operated by a rated carrier. We are urging the DOE to focus on making sure that those unrated carriers have enough inspections until they have a rating.”
Sant referred to “the proliferation of new carriers, particularly over the last four or five years” as having resulted in a squeeze where regulators can not keep up with all the numbers of new entrants that have taken to the roads.
The problem of cabotage
Another area of regulatory change the Trucking Alliance is seeking is one that already has become a target of the Sean Duffy Department of Transportation: cabotage.
Cabotage is a system where some portion of a company’s transportation needs can only be provided by providers based in that nation. It is most evident in the Jones Act, which requires that any waterborne freight being moved between U.S. ports must travel on a U.S.-flagged carrier.
In trucking, it is the requirement that while a truck from Mexico, operating under the rules of the former NAFTA and now the US-Canada-Mexico Agreement, can deliver freight across the border to a point in the U.S. But after the freight is delivered, it must head back to Mexico without picking up additional loads along the way.
Sant said there are technologies that are starting to reveal the scope of the problem. One of those is GenLogs, which he praised.
“GenLogs has identified at least 970 Mexican-based or Mexican domiciled carriers who are operating far north of the border zones in as many as 20 states, and have been captured tens of thousands of times,” Sant said.
Sant said “there’s just simply no reason for those carriers to be there, and you would have to concluded that they are operating illegally. They affect the security of our drivers and the workforce in the U.S. We feel like with the technology that exists today, enforcement could be much more effective at regulating that kind of abuse.”
Woodruff said efforts at enforcing English-language requirements, long on the books but almost never enforced, “probably brought this to light quiver than it might otherwise have.”
Among the Trucking Alliance’s recommendations for dealing with the issue of cabotage are the enforcement of the English language requirement and a closer surveillance of foreign carriers as they operate in the U.S.
A safer truck
Another recommended course of action that would have a direct impact on carriers are changes to the trucks themselves.
But the Alliance is not calling for autonomous vehicles as the path to a safer truck. “Rather than removing drivers from the truck, truck manufacturers should deploy advanced technologies now—systems that can assist drivers in making the safest decisions possible, to prevent collisions, and mitigate risk in real time,” the Alliance says in its white paper.
It lists technologies such as lane-keeping, adaptive braking and collision avoidance as tools that “can transform today’s fleet into safer trucks.”
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