Posted on / by The Trucking Alliance

The Future of Trucking Safety: Inside The Trucking Alliance’s 2026 Reform Agenda

Introduction

The trucking industry is currently in a defining moment in its history. Freight volumes are rising, the driver workforce is evolving, technology is advancing rapidly, and public awareness of highway safety has never been higher.

The Trucking Alliance partnered with FreightWaves for a roundtable discussion to examine the future of trucking safety heading into 2026. Hosted by FreightWaves’ John Kingston, the panel brought together respected leaders and safety advocates in the trucking industry to discuss the way forward. They include:

  • Steve Williams, President & Co-Founder, Trucking Alliance (& CEO, Maverick USA)
  • Greer Woodruff, EVP Safety, Sustainability & Maintenance, JB Hunt
  • Brett Sant, SVP, Knight Transportation
  • Lane Kidd, Managing Director, Trucking Alliance

The industry is facing challenges that didn’t exist at this scale even a decade ago.

Trucking Alliance President Steve Williams noted developments in the industry during the discussion:

“Over my lifetime, the U.S. population has doubled. So the solutions that we had in the 50s are not the same solutions that we have in the mid-20s.”

The scale, complexity, and risk of modern trucking demand a fundamentally different approach to tackle it effectively in the long term.

Here at the Trucking Alliance, we believe that safety reform must be strategic, collaborative, and based on evidence. Keep reading for more on our reform agenda in 2026, and watch the full interview below to understand why it matters now more than ever.

The Three Pillars of Trucking Safety Reform

The challenges that the trucking industry faces today are nowhere near the scale of challenges from even a decade ago. Increased congestion, fragmented enforcement, and uneven adoption of safety technology and protocols have created a system where risk isn’t mitigated adequately and evenly across the board.

At the Trucking Alliance, we want to mitigate risk evenly by focusing on building industry and public buy-in by looking at safety reform with existing data, and subsequently addressing issues with a multi-faceted approach. We focus on clear, evidence-based approaches that target the most persistent safety issues in the industry.

The Trucking Alliance’s Key Safety Priorities

As the Trucking Alliance team highlighted during the panel, the core challenge that the trucking industry faces today can be encapsulated by one word – “under”.

  • Under-tested drivers
  • Under-enforced carriers
  • Under-modernized regulation

Under-Tested Drivers: Strengthening Drug Testing & Driver Training

Closing the Drug Testing Gap

While drug testing is standard in the trucking industry, urinalysis is the most common testing protocol across the country. Some companies also use hair testing, which is 14x more effective than urine testing. The Department of Transportation (DoT) disqualifies drivers who test positive in urine tests. However, this is not the case for failed hair tests, as employers are not permitted to submit them to the DoT under federal law.

While trucking and logistics companies can terminate drivers who test positive in hair drug tests, there are no safeguards in place to stop these drivers from moving to another carrier undetected.

The DoT’s central database, the Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse, has been a major success in removing unsafe drivers. However, it currently excludes hair testing results, creating a critical blind spot that needs to be addressed urgently.

Public safety and accountability within the trucking industry are of utmost importance. To ensure both, the Trucking Alliance’s position is that hair testing results should be reported to the Clearinghouse to ensure that unsafe drivers cannot “job hop” across fleets.

The Training School Problem

Hair drug testing is a substantive step towards making our roads safer. Beyond substance testing, the Trucking Alliance is also focused on improving driver training programs. Many new drivers enter the workforce through poorly regulated or fraudulent training schools, and some schools push drivers onto highways without adequate safety preparation.

This practice has had a detrimental impact on the quality of drivers on the road. As a result, DoT Secretary Sean Duffy removed over 3,000 unsafe commercial driving schools from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) registry, signaling a shift toward stronger enforcement.

We believe better driver training standards are just as important as better substance testing. Safety standards need to be all-encompassing and robust, because ensuring safety starts before a driver steps foot on the gas.

Under-Enforced Carriers: Oversight, Technology & Safer Trucks

The Hidden Risk of Unrated Carriers

One of the most overlooked safety challenges in the trucking industry is that over 90% of trucking companies have no federal safety rating issued by the FMCSA. Lane Kidd, managing director of the Trucking Alliance, explains in the interview:

“That’s bad enough, but layer in over that the fact that those unrated carriers are engaged in 84% of all the serious large truck crashes that involve fatalities and injuries. So in other words, if you do the math on this, a truck operated by an unrated carrier today is nine times more likely to be in a crash than a truck operated by a rated carrier.”

This disparity exists due to a lack of enforcement. Regulators can’t inspect, rate, and monitor the booming population of small and new carriers entering the market. This results in a system where companies operate with little to no scrutiny, in an industry where addressing safety concerns is paramount.

Smarter Oversight Through Technology

Traditional safety oversight depends on roadside inspections and on-site compliance reviews, which are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale evenly across the country.

This is where Level 8 Inspections come in. Here’s a succinct explanation from Greer Woodruff, EVP Safety, Sustainability & Maintenance at JB Hunt:

“We are in favor of what’s called a Level 8 Inspection, where the truck can communicate information, including hours of service and other information, as they approach a weigh station. We can provide that data electronically, and the inspection station can either ask us to pull in or ask our driver to bypass that station. We are piloting that with many of our Alliance carriers with FMCSA, and we’re seeing good results with that.”

Level 8 Inspections allow verification of the truck’s compliance data without requiring the truck to stop, saving time and allowing for data-driven safety enforcement.

This creates three key benefits:

  • Better targeting
  • Less friction for compliant fleets
  • More efficient use of FMCSA resources

Creating a Safer Truck

Safer trucking isn’t limited to drug testing, safety reports, and better driver training. It also includes advancements in vehicular technology that create more robust trucks and improve crash prevention.

So far, the industry has gotten great momentum advocating for:

  • Electronic logging devices (ELDs)
  • Electronic braking systems

While these tools have improved accountability and compliance, Steve Williams speaks about hiccups in the process:

“We were very happy that we’ve made the progress that we’ve had, but we’ve learned that they don’t always work the way that we had hoped that they would.”

Improvements need to be made to ensure that policies are implemented effectively. No piece of legislation is without flaws that need correction, and we’re not afraid to admit that further adjustments are needed to policies we “won”.

As the Trucking Alliance continues its 2026 agenda, we’ll be focusing on:

  • Proper ELD certification standards
  • Continued investment in vehicle safety technology
  • Data-driven monitoring of fleet performance

Under-Modernized Regulation: Insurance & Cabotage

The 45-Year-Old Insurance Problem

The federal minimum insurance coverage for motor carriers has been stuck at $750,000 since 1980. Adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly $3 to 3.6 million today. As Brett Sant, SVP of Knight Transportation, notes:

“What you have is a situation where hundreds of hundreds of thousands of operators operating well more than a million power units really are not scrutinized either by the FMCSA and their state partners or by the insurance industry when they are underwritten. That’s a real problem.”

Why this matters:

  • Serious accidents routinely exceed $750K in medical costs alone.
  • Low minimums encourage weak underwriting.
  • Under-insured carriers pose systemic risk.

The Trucking Alliance’s recommendation is to raise minimum insurance thresholds to reflect modern economic and safety realities. Ensuring this will promote safer carrier behavior and strengthen underwriting discipline.

Eliminating Illegal Cabotage

Cabotage violations occur when foreign carriers illegally haul domestic freight. This represents another blind spot for regulatory oversight and enforcement.

Brett Sant emphasized the impact it has on overall safety, noting:

“Those issues affect safety, they affect the security of our drivers and the workforce in the United States. You know, we feel like with the technology that exists today, enforcement could be much more effective at regulating that kind of abuse.”

Additionally, new data tools like GenLogs have identified that at least 970 Mexican-based or Mexican-domiciled carriers with OP-2 authority captured tens of thousands of times operating far north of the border zones in as many as 20 states. There’s simply no reason for those carriers to be there, and you’d have to conclude that there’s systemic noncompliance of regulations.

Here’s why this matters:

  • Safety risks from insufficient oversight
  • Regulatory evasion that disrupts enforcement capability and credibility
  • Unfair competition that undermines the domestic trucking industry

A Trucking Safety Agenda That Benefits Everyone

Between under-tested drivers, under-enforced carriers, and under-modernized regulation, the trucking industry still has plenty of room to add guardrails that keep us safer.

Lane Kidd expanded on this, referencing popular sentiment on social media:

“Go on social media and now you’re starting to see all these videos…The general public is aware. They’re aware that maybe now we have an issue with an industry that a lot of us didn’t pay attention to, but because of these recent accidents, they’re very focused on it.”

Now, more than ever, people are paying attention to safety lapses and the need to maintain public safety and the public is realizing the importance of ensuring that the trucking industry remains safe for all stakeholders.

The Trucking Alliance’s 2026 reform agenda emphasizes the need of the hour: to close safety and regulatory gaps that put drivers, fleets, and families at risk.

The objective of our framework is one where:

  • Safe companies thrive
  • Unsafe operators are filtered out
  • The public can trust the system again

Trucking safety isn’t a trucking industry issue; it’s a public safety issue. The Trucking Alliance’s 2026 agenda offers one of the clearest roadmaps for ensuring that our roads are safe.

Learn more about our advocacy work by following The Trucking Alliance on LinkedIn and listen to the full Freightwaves panel discussion to learn more about issues in the trucking industry.