The Texas Department of Public Safety recently inspected almost 8,000 commercial motor vehicles as part of what they called Roadcheck 2018.
A local truck driver, Jimmy Dailey, gets in his truck every week and drives from Texas to California and back– a route he’s been driving for more than 40 years.
“I run back and forth from Texas to California every week, average around 3,000 miles per week,” Dailey said.
Being on the road everyday comes with its struggles, with stops and repairs, but he says it’s all he knows. Although the roadchecks are time-consuming, he said he understands their importance.
“We don’t have a lot of time to be stopped and sitting to deal with situations like that, but you gotta obey the law. If you don’t get it fixed, yeah, it is dangerous, you’re putting your life in jeopardy,” Dailey said. “So I more or less try to maintain my truck and make sure everything is operating.”
DPS checks vehicles yearly for safety violations.
“The reason we put vehicles out of service is that there’s defective part of their equipment that is a danger to go down the road,” said Bryan Witt, media lieutenant for regent 5.
They say the most common issues are bad brakes and defective tires.
“The (truck drivers) have to correct that before they go back down the road and that could be brakes, it could be cracked rims, it could be lighting systems,” Witt said.
But for Dailey, he says this won’t stop him from getting on the road every day.
“It doesn’t take a whole lot of time, more or less when DPS stops us, it’s little things like an air leak on a truck or trailer something like that,” Dailey said.
DPS also inspected valid drivers licenses and hours-of-service compliance. They say they also issued more than 18,000 warnings.
