Roadcheck 2012, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s(CVSA) 72-hour safety blitz, is scheduled for June 5-7, 2012. CVA sponsors Roadcheck with participation by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators, Transport Canada, and the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (Mexico).

Roadcheck is the largest targeted enforcement program on commercial vehicles in the world, with approximately 14 trucks or buses being inspected, on average, every minutefrom Canada to Mexico during a 72-hour period.

Starting June 5, certified officers will blanket North America’s roadways with the hope of preventing truck and bus crashes and save lives.

During this 72-hour period, an estimated 10,000 CVSA-certified federal, state and local enforcement inspectors conduct truck and bus inspections at 1,500 North America locations. The CVSA  inspectors are local, state, provincial, territorial and federal motor-carrier safety officials and industry representatives in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

These inspections involve a comprehensive 37-step procedure which includes items related to vehicle, driver and cargo safety. Inspectors also hand out educational materials to drivers on various aspects of commercial vehicle, driver and hazardous materials safety.

During the 2011 Roadcheck event, CMV enforcement conducted 70,172  inspections across the U.S. Of those, almost 49,000 were Level 1. Vehicle compliance rates were about 80.7 percent and drivers had a 95.8 percent pass rate.  This is a new all time high record for  driver compliance rates beating the  2009 record of 95.7 percent.

The primary reasons cited by inspectors for placing vehicles and drivers out of service  was hours-of-service compliance issues topped this year’s driver violation list, accounting for 52.5% of all driver out-of-service violations. On the vehicle side, brakes, tires and lights resulted in the most violations.

Since its inception in 1988, the roadside inspections conducted during Roadcheck have numbered more than 1 million. Learn more about the program at cvsa.org.