First, one has to understand the original purpose behind the position...
City drivers work for their respective local center. Daily decisions for city drivers are made by their local center and all city drivers answer to local management.
Road drivers work for and answer to Central Dispatch. We are governed by local management but all daily decisions are made by Central Dispatch. Contrary to popular belief, some managers/local dispatchers do not know or understand all of the policies regarding the road operation and most are going to do what’s best for their local center. We can question a local management’s decision by going to Central Dispatch and getting a “final answer” which at times overturns/corrects the local management.
The original intent of the RDA position was to act as a liaison between road drivers and local/Central...kinda like our Regional Road Driver Managers used to do back in the day. The decision was made to call them “advisers” instead of “managers” because the position has no teeth, they have no power or authority to make decisions like the previous managers had. Having the position under operations made since considering this original intent, but now the position is under safety,
, which changes everything IMO.
An argument could be made with this position now being under safety that they could in fact offer advice to city drivers...the problem being one person per region simply couldn’t keep up with that many drivers. For example, we have one RSA (Road Safety Adviser) for the CLT region (North and South Carolina) yet we have almost as many city/road drivers in CLT as the rest of our region combined.
The position should’ve been left under operations IMO but once you’ve been with this company long enough, you’ll learn they can’t leave well enough alone!!