Blue Ink Tech Blog

In September 13,733 new DOT numbers were issued for new carriers. This is down from August and continues the downward trend of new trucking authorities in the US. New trucking companies are down over 34% from 2022's year high of 21,059.

Today's trucks and trailers are almost all manufactured with air suspension to make the ride as smooth as possible, reduce strain on the truck's drive train, and improve fuel mileage. It's also paved the way for air suspension truck scales and pressure gauges to measure load weight. Suspension truck scales are great because they don't interfere with the trailer raising and lowering to keep a stable ride height. They're also easily installed and replaced, which minimizes the amount of downtime needed to maintain them.

The ELD mandate was introduced in December 2017, requiring all commercial motor vehicles to keep their Hours of Service (HOS) logs electronically. This was a huge shift from the old way of keeping track of HOS logs using paper logbooks. Years into the ELD mandate, there is still some confusion on what it is, who is exempt, what is required to be collected, and what restrictions are placed on manufactures.

In September 2022 the DOT executed 262,785 inspections and issued 137,212 violations across the US. We take a look at the numbers of inspections and violations that were held in each state and see which FMCSA BASIC measure they enforced the most.

The violations are grouped together based on which BASIC category that they fall under. Some violations do not fall under a specific BASIC category and were not counted in the tables.

The "Vehicle Maintenance" category took the largest share of overall violations with 84,705 violations accounting for over 60% of the total violations issued in the US.

Read below to see how many inspections your state started and and how many of those inspections turned into violations.

The ELD requirements set by the FMCSA in the ELD mandate are complex and in-depth rules on how electronic logging devices must act when keeping a driver's hours-of-service records. There are a lot of opinions about how the best ELDs should keep hours-of-service rules and navigate the gray areas that cause a log of frustration among drivers and carriers.