The federal government’s Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 is supported by the trucking industry but needs some changes, a trucking executive testifying for American Trucking Associations told a congressional panel Wednesday.
“ATA has a number of serious concerns relating to how CSA 2010 will work that, if not addressed, will have a dramatic impact on motor carriers and on highway safety,” Transportation Corp. of America Chief Executive Officer Keith Klein told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s subcommittee on highways and transit.
He said that while ATA supports CSA 2010’s objectives of targeting unsafe operators, changing their behavior and removing the most egregious actors from the road, its concerns include making crash accountability, or “causation” determinations, on truck-involved crashes before entering them into a carrier’s record.
ATA also said that CSA should use vehicle miles traveled — and not the number of trucks or power units — as a carrier’s exposure measure, and that CSA should focus on using only actual citations for moving violations and not unadjudicated “warnings” issued by law enforcement.
“A system that is based on inconsistent data and a flawed scoring methodology will not achieve its objectives. Instead, it will create inequities for some safe carriers and inappropriately allow some unsafe carriers to avoid scrutiny and consequences,” Klein said.
