ATA Demands Release of Years-Old Study on Weighting of Violations in CSA Scores

In its second request in a week for closely held federal research, American Trucking Associations is asking federal regulators to publicly release a five-year-old study that contains data explaining how regulators weight violations that it used to compute Compliance, Safety, Accountability program safety scores for drivers and carriers.

In a statement last week, ATA said that the trucking industry has a “right and need” to know the findings of a 2007 Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration study that explains the agency’s methodology in determining the number of points it assigns to safety violations, and the links those “severity weightings” have to a motor carrier or driver’s crash risk.

“FMCSA has an obligation to re-lease this study so that the industry, and other stakeholders, may evaluate CSA and offer substantive proposals to improve it,” ATA President Bill Graves said in a statement.

The 2007 study was done by the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, Cambridge, Mass.

An FMCSA spokeswoman said the report would be available “in the coming days.”

“Our concern — and we think the agency should share this concern — is that scores ultimately tie to crash risk or reflect a propensity for future crash risk,” said Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for ATA.

The CSA program, which FMCSA launched in early 2010, was designed as a tool to help the agency and the industry become more effective and efficient in reducing commercial motor vehicle crashes, fatalities and injuries.

ATA, which has been generally supportive of the program, and other industry stakeholders recently have criticized the agency for delaying a crash accountability process to identify those crashes on a driver’s or carrier’s record that could not have been prevented.

The CSA process takes each carrier’s safety events — roadside inspection violations and crashes — assigns weight to the violations and places them into seven categories known as BASICs, or Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories.

A 2011 evaluation of the CSA program concluded that scores in some BASICs categories do not have a positive relationship to crash risk, Abbott said.

“In some cases they don’t have any relationship to crash risk, or have potentially an inverse relationship to crash risk,” Abbott said. “It’s likely that some of the violation weights are inappropriately assigned so that some are set too high and some are set too low.”

The 2011 evaluation, done by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, noted that not all of the hundreds of truck-related federal regulations have the same relationship to crash risk.

“Whether the weights used in the calculation of the BASICs scores are appropriate is not known,” the evaluation stated. “However, based on our own experience with the data available for such an analysis, this is an area that would benefit from continuing review and improvement.

“The weights themselves seem reasonable, but given the sheer number of violations and the difficulty of linking individual violations to crash risk, this is clearly an area for continued development as the Safety Measurement System goes forward.”

ATA has made three written requests for the 2007 study, titled “Violation Severity Assessment Study Final Report,” since May 2010, but FMCSA has declined to provide it, Abbott said.

“We have to wonder if their reluctance to release it is indicative of perhaps the fact that it doesn’t support the design of the program — that somehow it undermines the design of the program,” Abbott said.

ATA already has determined that some of the violation weightings appear illogical, Abbott said.

For example, Abbott said the relative risk of a driver texting while on the road is much greater than using a hand-held cell phone. “But both violations bear a weight of 10 on a scale of one to 10 in the system,” Abbott said.

“So our sense is that sometimes these weights are assigned somewhat arbitrarily, but certainly not in a way that ties them to specific crash risk,” Abbott said.

Earlier this month, ATA called on the agency to release the results of another CSA-related study that the group said could buttress the case for using police reports to determine who is a fault in truck-related crashes (6-11, p. 1).

Graves said that FMCSA’s failure to disclose critical background information contained in the two unreleased reports “contradicts the agency’s claims of openness and transparency.”

ATA is not alone in seeking the 2007 study.

In a December 2011 report to FMCSA, the agency’s motor carrier safety advisory committee also noted a problem with a lack of data when it studied the severity-weighting issue.

“During the course of its discussions, MCSAC [Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee] learned that the initial severity weightings were not all based on data, but rather, in part, on the opinion of experts and others with some knowledge of accident causation,” the committee’s report said. “Because MCSAC did not have such data, its recommendations with respect to appropriate violation severity weights largely reflects guesswork on the relationship between particular violations and crashes.”