Carter Express, of Anderson, Indiana, is an international motor carrier and logistics company with 750 power units. It was founded in 1980 with three trucks and quickly grew and developed its Shared Milkrun – a large network of routes, partners and facilities that work together to create greater supply chain efficiency – which is a key differentiator for the fleet.

Since deploying the SmartDrive video-based safety program, Carter felt compelled to create a video to help its insurance carrier understand the company’s safety culture, the people and the investment in technology that the company is undergoing.

CSA Change – Carter’s Gain

Carter made the decision to deploy the SmartDrive program because the company believed that it would result in safer driving behaviors from its drivers and that it would also improve its CSA Scores and help in litigation.

During this time, the FMCSA had changed Carter’s CSA group and placed the company into the large carrier group – large fleets that don’t run a large percent of their miles in Indiana. FMCSA updates the Safety Measurement System (SMS) once a month and organizes the data into seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs). The SMS groups carriers by BASIC with other carriers that have a similar number of safety events and then ranks carriers and assigns a percentile to prioritize them for interventions.

Because Carter is smaller and based in Indiana, 20% of its miles are run in the state, but over 55% of its CSA violations comes from Indiana. Why? As reported in a recent Transport Topics article, Indiana is a much higher enforcement state than almost any other state.

In Indiana in the past two years, more than 46,000 speeding violations were handed out to truck drivers going too fast, mostly on interstates and rural highways. That number represents 15% of all violations and more than twice the number of violations recorded by any other state in the country. Making no apologies, “Indiana, unlike many other states, focuses almost all of its enforcement on crash-causing moving violations,” stated Gary Langston, president of the Indiana Motor Truck Association.

Carter CEO, John Paugh, accepts that the company has been put into the large carrier group as it holds the company to a higher standard. Due to this change Carter is investing heavily in technology, including the SmartDrive video safety program.

According to Paugh, “At the end of the day, all of our drivers want to get home safely. And when they know this company cares about their safety 100%, they understand that this is where they want to be. This is family.”

Watch the video for a deeper understanding of how Carter is transforming its fleet … and how you can too.