CSA Scores Should Better Align With Safety Risks, Report Says

This story appears in the July 6 print edition of Transport Topics.

The federal government’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program needs to be better aligned with the safety risks that cause truck crashes, according to a report by an independent review team.

Although the report was completed in July 2014, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration did not make it public until last week.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx ordered the review early in 2014 after the National Transportation Safety Board found that FMCSA failed to identify safety issues during audits of four carriers that later were involved in serious crashes.

In response to the report, FMCSA announced in a June 29 Federal Register posting that it is making changes to the CSA program to more closely align intervention thresholds of its safety rating categories to crash risks. The agency is taking comment on the changes and expects to preview them later this year.

The review team generally agreed with NTSB that FMCSA’s current process for assessing risk posed by carriers does not consistently generate the intended results.

“A meaningful, effective oversight and enforcement policy needs to be risk-based and agile enough to apply resources to the greatest risks,” they said in their report.

The six-member review team, headed by William Voss, deputy director of the Federal Aviation Administration, also included members from DOT, a state motor vehicle administration and the private sector.

The review team also recommended that FMCSA “expand and work with industry and stakeholders to develop safety measurement system enhancements.”

“These enhancements should enable FMCSA to better discern motor carrier management actions that lead to crashes and to allow more timely and appropriate investigation and enforcement actions.”

CSA uses data from roadside safety inspections and accident reports to analyze the safety performance of trucking and bus companies.

Carrier interventions are tied to poor CSA scores, but people in trucking, other parts of the government and university researchers have questioned whether CSA measures the most useful events and actions in calculating scores.

The review team’s report also found a significant backlog of “nearly due or overdue investigations” because the agency manages its workload primarily on a “first-in, first-out production model” and not on a “risk-targeting” basis.

The safety scores of about 27% of more than 7,000 motor carriers flagged for compliance reviews got even worse before the audits actually were conducted, according to the report.

Conversely, nearly 33% of those carriers selected brought their scores into compliance between the time they were picked for examination and when the reviews were conducted, the report said.

Despite their concerns, the review team said FMCSA personnel were professional and trying hard to grapple with challenges posed by the CSA program.

“The current leaders of FMCSA share many of the concerns of the NTSB and other stakeholders about this process,” the report said. “Current operating conditions and methods appear to constrain FMCSA.”

The release of the report coincides with FMCSA announcing it is making “enhancements” to the CSA program, introducing three levels of crash risk correlation:

• High correlation: Unsafe driving, crash indicator, hours-of-service compliance.

• Medium: Vehicle maintenance.

• Low: Controlled substances/alcohol, hazmat compliance and driver fitness.

The changes would maintain the current intervention thresholds of 65% for the high-risk behavioral categories, or BASICs, with the strongest relationship to crash risk and reduce the medium-risk threshold to 75% from 80%.

Fewer carriers will be identified for interventions in those BASICs where FMCSA proposes to raise the low-risk BASICs threshold to 90% from 80%.

“ATA is particularly pleased that the independent review team highlighted the critical need for FMCSA to better align compliance and enforcement programs with the risks that actually cause crashes,” said Dave Osiecki, American Trucking Associations’ chief of national advocacy. “A number of stakeholders, including the Government Accountability Office, have observed the agency is often focused on compliance issues that do not bear a relationship to crash risk.”

FMCSA spokesman Duane DeBruyne said, “A number of the recommendations were initiated before or during the work of the independent review team.”

In a June 26 blog, the agency’s chief safety officer, Jack Van Steenburg, said one of those recommendations the agency has acted on is to “strengthen the use of high-quality data to provide a sharper definition of ‘high risk’ that will allow FMCSA to identify carriers with significant risk of a crash and to intervene quickly.”