40 DC VELOCITY JULY 2015 www.dcvelocity.com
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Jeff Tucker is CEO of Tucker Co.
Worldwide Inc., a family-owned brokerage in Haddonfield, N.J., that focuses
on high-value freight. The company was
founded in 1961 by Tucker’s grandfather, Jacob, as J.A. Tucker & Co. After
Jacob’s death, Tucker’s grandmother,
Ruth, ran the company; later Jeff’s
father, Bill, took over. Now, Jeff runs
the company with his brother Jim, who
is president and COO.
Tucker’s father has been a big presence in the industry,
having co-founded the Transportation Intermediaries
Association (TIA), and Jeff is following in his footsteps.
Since 2006, he has chaired TIA’s Carrier Selection
Framework Committee and co-written every version of
the Carrier Selection Framework. This year, he became
chairman of the TIA’s board of directors. He’s involved
with TIA’s efforts to pass H.R. 1120 and S. 1454, bills
that would create a national hiring standard for motor
carriers.
Tucker has testified before the House of
Representatives’ Committee on Small Business. The
Department of Transportation tapped him to serve on
its Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program
subcommittee, advising the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Administration (FMCSA) on issues affecting its
motor carrier safety scoring and selection criteria.
Q What are your priorities as the new TIA chair?
A Over the next two years, I see two overarching priorities.
One is that we establish some reasonable national
standard around the hiring of motor carriers, so that
the ambiguity around selecting carriers that exists
today, and that’s promulgated by FMCSA’s program,
no longer exists. That, to me, is of critical importance.
The other thing I would like to see—and I think that
TIA has a great opportunity to get this done—is recruit
more women for leadership roles in the organization.
To that end, I’ve charged staff, and I’ve challenged the
board and committee chairs, to actively identify and
have dialogue with women who could potentially serve
as committee members, committee chairs, or board
members of TIA. Fifty percent or more of the transportation people our company deals with are women. I
would like to spend significant effort making the make-up of organizations, principally TIA, representative of
that population.
Q What needs to be done on the national motor carrier hiring standard?
A The CSA program is the first phase of a multiphase project. These
[motor carrier safety] scores were never
meant to be interpreted on their own.
They’re evidences of a citation or a violation, or even a warning in some cases.
None of the scores predict a future
crash. Law enforcement varies dramatically from state to state. Then, when
state law enforcement gives a citation,
FMCSA has arbitrarily applied a weighting to that. So, an unbuckled seatbelt has worse consequences on the score than another kind of violation.
FMCSA really has to get that house in order first. It’s
got to properly weight these things.
Phase two hasn’t come yet, and that’s creating an
algorithm using all CSA scores (public and private) that
spits out something that says yes or no, use this carrier
or don’t. But FMCSA is starting to forget that it has
to do phase two, and it’s been saying, “Hey, use CSA’s
BASIC (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement
Category) scores.”
[The CSA] has been criticized by everyone, including
[the DOT’s] own inspector general, for goodness’ sake,
and it’s leading to lots of frivolous lawsuits against
shippers and brokers. The TIA says the data’s use-
less. And academia, the inspector general, and GAO
(Government Accountability Office) say similar things.
I don’t know how much more clear you can be that
this program is a terrible program for carrier selection,
as FMCSA’s suggesting it be used. I agree entirely with
FMCSA that the data it has for internal purposes is far
better than what it had in the last program. But it lost
all credibility the moment it said this data should be
used for carrier selection.
So, fix phase one, get it to the point where the scores
are more relevant, and then put your algorithm together that might predict a future crash.
Also, there are two measures before Congress right
now that would create a national motor carrier hiring
standard: H.R. 1120 in the House and S. 1454 in the
Senate. We see these as a priority.
Q What’s going on with that effort?
A As with many bills, last Congress it died. It’s a new Congress, so we have gotten more support, and
we’re making headway. We [TIA] continue to meet
with Senate staff and House staff, and they’ve expressed
to us their prior concerns, which has really helped. So,
I think it’s really up to all the different stakeholders out
there to coalesce around a position that might satisfy
the committee members.
Jeff Tucker
