BILL ANALYSIS Ó SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND HOUSING Senator Jim Beall, Chair 2015 - 2016 Regular Bill No: AB 1677 Hearing Date: 6/28/2016 ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Author: |Ting | |----------+------------------------------------------------------| |Version: |5/31/2016 | ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Urgency: |No |Fiscal: |Yes | ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Consultant|Sarah Carvill | |: | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUBJECT: Vehicles: tour buses: safety inspections DIGEST: This bill requires the California Highway Patrol (CHP) to develop protocols for collaborating with representatives of local government to increase the number of tour bus inspections within their jurisdictions. ANALYSIS: Existing law: 1)Defines "charter-party carriers of passengers" (CPCs) as persons engaged in the transportation of persons by motor vehicle for compensation over any public highway. 2)Defines "passenger stage corporations" (PSCs) as corporations or persons engaged as a common carrier, for compensation, in the ownership, control, operation, or management of any passenger stage over any public highway in the state between fixed termini or over a regular route, as specified. 3)Defines a "bus" as a vehicle designed, used, or maintained for carrying more than 10 persons, including the driver, which is used to transport persons for compensation or profit, or is used by any non-profit organization or group. 4)Defines a "tour bus" as a bus operated by or for a CPC or PSC. AB 1677 (Ting) Page 2 of ? 5)Requires that CPCs and PSCs obtain a permit from and register all individual buses with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). 6)Requires the CHP to regulate the equipment, maintenance, and safe operation of tour buses. 7)Requires all tour buses to be inspected every 45 days by the tour bus operator, or more often if necessary to ensure safe operation, to correct any defects that are found during an inspection before transporting passengers, and to keep detailed records of inspections and repairs performed. 8)Requires the CHP to conduct annual terminal inspections on a representative subset of each carrier's buses and records to verify that buses are being maintained in accordance with the law. For companies with fewer than 100 buses, inspections are scheduled in advance. 9)Requires that a terminal that receives an "unsatisfactory" rating in an inspection must be inspected again within 120 days. This bill: 1)Requires the CHP to develop protocols for entering into memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with local governments, upon the request of and in consultation with those entities, to allow the CHP to increase the number of inspections of locally-operating tour buses. 2)Provides that any such MoU must contain a provision requiring the local government entity to reimburse the CHP for all costs associated with the additional inspections. 3)Requires that any additional inspections conducted by the CHP pursuant to such an agreement not be duplicative of the inspections the CHP must conduct under existing law. COMMENTS: 1)Purpose. According to the author, dangerous vehicles fall through the cracks of the existing tour bus regulatory system, causing preventable tragedies on our streets. In a 2013 report, the California State Auditor concluded that CPUC's AB 1677 (Ting) Page 3 of ? oversight of passenger carriers is insufficient to ensure consumer and public safety. The CHP inspects tour bus terminals for the CPUC, but inspections cover only a sample of each bus company's fleet each year. This results in the inspection of a fraction of all buses, about 30 %. The author argues that, as the entities most closely impacted by the tour bus industry, local governments would benefit from uniform guidelines and statutory authority to collaborate with CHP to inspect tour buses that directly affect their communities and visitors. This bill requires the CHP to develop protocols for entering into memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with local governments in order to increase the number of tour buses being inspected. 2)Background: San Francisco tour bus accidents. On November 13, 2015, 19 people were injured when a City Sightseeing bus crashed into construction scaffolding in San Francisco's Union Square. Despite early speculation that the vehicle's brakes may have failed, on March 23, 2016, the CHP announced that the cause of the crash was driver error. Post-crash investigations revealed that City Sightseeing had not notified the CPUC when it added the bus to its fleet, as required by law, and the CHP identified other safety violations at the company in a December 2015 terminal inspection. Tour buses have caused two pedestrian fatalities in the last two years, most recently in January, when an 82-year-old man was struck and killed as he attempted to cross a busy street in the Western Addition neighborhood. The other incident occurred in the crosswalk in front of City Hall, and prompted San Francisco to pass an ordinance preventing tour bus drivers from narrating their tours while driving. A tour bus burst into flames on Haight Street in May of 2015. Summer of 2013 saw a similar tour bus fire, as well as an incident in which a tour bus struck a power line in the Richmond District. 3)Terminal inspections: What they do and what they don't do. Buses must undergo frequent maintenance, which is why existing law requires operators to perform their own safety checks and routine repairs on every vehicle at least once every 45 days - far more often than regulators could be called in for inspections. There are also tradeoffs between the number of buses that are checked in an inspection and the amount of notice given to operators, on the one hand, and the impact to an operator's service on the other. While the ideal inspection program might involve surprise terminal visits in AB 1677 (Ting) Page 4 of ? which all buses are physically examined, this approach would severely compromise an operator's ability to deliver reliable service to paying customers. The current terminal inspection program balances these tradeoffs by checking a subset of vehicles and examining terminal records to determine whether operators have established systems that ensure that all of their vehicles are safely maintained. One assumption underlying this approach is that it would be extraordinarily difficult for operators to persuasively "fake" correspondence between maintenance records and actual under-the-hood conditions. Importantly, terminal inspections also include examination of records related to driver safety, so these inspections are relevant to accidents caused by driver error as well as those caused by mechanical failures. 4)Uniformity versus vigilance. This bill provides a pathway for local governments to increase oversight of tour buses operating within their jurisdictions if they perceive a need for additional scrutiny. As originally written, the bill would have granted local governments the authority to conduct supplemental inspections themselves. This provision prompted concerns that the bill would erode the statewide consistency conveyed by the CHP inspection system and subject carriers to multiple, differing enforcement schemes in each jurisdiction in which they operate. Amendments taken in the Assembly require additional inspections to be conducted by the CHP at the expense of local entities, and specify that additional inspections may not be duplicative of those conducted under the existing program. The current version of the bill does disrupt the uniformity of the current system, but to a much lesser degree than the original proposal. Related Legislation: AB 1574 (Chiu, 2016) - requires the CPUC to verify with the Department of Motor Vehicles that the buses, limousines, and modified limousines used by PSCs and CPCs have been reported and meet safety requirements. This bill is also being heard in this committee today. SB 812 (Hill, 2016) - changes existing terminal inspection program administered by the CHP to make it more performance-based. This bill is pending hearing in the Assembly Transportation Committee. AB 1677 (Ting) Page 5 of ? Assembly Votes: Floor: 52-26 Appr: 14-6 Trans: 10-4 FISCAL EFFECT: Appropriation: No Fiscal Com.: Yes Local: No POSITIONS: (Communicated to the committee before noon on Wednesday, June 22, 2016.) SUPPORT: Consumer Attorneys of California San Francisco, City and County of San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Walk San Francisco OPPOSITION: None received -- END --