Feds call for closure of over 550 commercial truck-driving schools

(AP) — More than 550 commercial driving schools in the U.S. that train truckers and bus drivers must close after investigators found they employed unqualified instructors, failed to adequately test students and had other safety issues, the federal Transportation Department announced Wednesday.

The move marks the Transportation Department’s latest effort to improve safety in the trucking industry. And unlike its previous actions last fall to decertify up to 7,500 schools that included many defunct operations, this latest step is focused on what it deemed were active schools with significant shortcomings that inspectors identified in 1,426 site visits.

The department has been aggressively going after states that handed out commercial driver’s licenses to immigrants who shouldn’t have qualified for them ever since a fatal crash in August. A truck driver that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says was not authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people. Other fatal crashes ...