Tractor-trailers and other commercial vehicles are critical to the economy and also clog Georgia’s roads. The number of freight vehicles increased even before the seven-year dredging and deepening of the Port of Savannah that concluded in 2022. And the trend continues, especially with the online shopping boom in recent years.
But big trucks cause big problems when they crash or breakdown — or when their professional drivers make poor decisions.
Enter the Georgia Department of Public Safety’s newly renamed Commercial Vehicle Enforcement division, the unit tasked with keeping these industrial drivers and large autos up to snuff. Formerly the Motor Carrier Compliance Division, Lt. Stephen Burnham of the CVE explained why his team changed names on July 1.
“You read the patch that’s on my uniform now and you know exactly what we do. And that’s the objective,” the 10-year veteran told 11Alive and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
CVE tries to tackle small problems before they become larger ones. Officers can pull over any commercial vehicle 10,000 pounds or more at random and ask to see the trip logs and vehicle records. But many of the nearly 50,000 stops the CVE had conducted this year, through July 25, actually began when troopers saw something amiss.
“What’s actually causing crashes? It could be related to mechanical failure, it could be crash causative factors related to driver behavior, like distracted driving,” Burnham said. “Approximately 41% of those inspections were generated from a traffic enforcement violation.”
In fact, Georgia has had the third-most truck safety inspections (20,685) in the U.S. this year, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Because of the large number of trucks on Georgia roads, the state leads the nation in moving violations by commercial drivers this year (22,091) and drug and alcohol offenses (677).
Troopers can choose to conduct roadside inspections on these large trucks, a process Burnham said can take anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour. They can, among other things, check around inside the cab or driving compartment, look under the hood, inspect the tires and actually crawl up under the vehicles.
“We try to get it off an interstate and into a safe location on a surface street or we’ll do stuff on the off-ramp or on-ramp,” Burnham said, as they do not want to cause more traffic or put the officers or drivers in unsafe positions on the roads.
Small infractions can result in a written warning or a fine, and major ones can take trucks — and drivers — immediately out of commission.
Burnham said that CVE also checks passenger manifests, as drivers are not allowed to carry any unlisted people in their trucks. This is a step in fighting human trafficking, too, he said.
Metro Atlanta drivers have seen what can go wrong when truck companies are lax on maintenance. A big truck that hit and damaged the Mount Vernon Road bridge over I-285 in 2023 was 4 feet too tall and 40,000 pounds overweight, 11Alive’s Jerry Carnes reported at the time. The initial crash shut down I-285 for hours and that Mount Vernon bridge for months.
My 11Alive traffic co-anchor, Rachel Cox-Rosen, and I have covered multiple tractor-trailer wrecks in our two months working together. They can shut down freeways for hours, cause miles of delays, and cause injuries and deaths.
And big rig drivers are not always the ones at fault. When drivers in smaller cars make sudden and evasive moves around tractor-trailers, the trucks’ margins to react are tight.
Because of this, Burnham and the CVE team deploy a driving simulator rig and take it all over the state in an effort to educate noncommercial motorists on what truck drivers face.
Burnham also wanted to make sure the public knows that the trucking industry in Georgia is largely full of good actors. He said CVE’s push to nab noncompliant trucks and drivers is to root out the bad apples and to make Georgia’s roads safer.
As we often say in this space, safety is a team effort on these streets.
Doug Turnbull covers the traffic/transportation beat for WXIA-TV (11Alive). His reports appear on the 11Alive Morning News from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and on 11Alive.com. Email Doug at dturnbull@11alive.com.
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