Editorial: Crash Accounting Common Sense
Life can be tough and challenging, something people in trucking know well. Momentary lapses that other industries can endure easily may have serious impacts in trucking: damaged freight, environmental spills and even bodily injury or death.
Trucking is not a “cut me some slack” type of business. Carrier executives are not asking to sweep real culpability for actions under a rug, but there is something to be said for devising government rules that are not so rigid they wind up being applied in absurd and tortured ways.
As an example, consider the analysis the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published Jan. 21 on crash statistics. The agency paid a consultant to examine the way crash reporting is used in computing scores for the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.
Since the CSA rollout in December 2010, any significant crash has counted as a negative factor on a carrier’s or driver’s CSA score and an indicator that another accident could be coming. The FMCSA study said the policy probably should continue, as it would be extremely difficult to find a better way that could be easily administered.
We could not disagree more strongly.
Operating trucks sloppily causes accidents, and doing so continually will cause more of them. Accidents where carriers and truck drivers are found to be at fault should be counted in CSA scores.
Many times, though, car drivers are at fault for an accident, and sometimes terrible things happen randomly and no one is at fault. In those cases, truck drivers and carriers should not be blamed.
Reading the FMCSA study shows that police accident reports can be inconsistent or incomplete. Assessing blame for all truck-involved accidents — 95,000 people were injured in 2013 — would be a daunting task.
Perfect responsibility is not possible, but what about carving out exceptions for, say, five painfully obvious cases that do happen:
If a vehicle rear-ends a truck that is properly stopped at a red light, or if a car travels the wrong way down a divided highway into the front of a truck, please don’t blame the trucker.
If a car runs a red light and T-bones a truck proceeding legally through an intersection, or if a despondent soul ends his life by tossing himself in front of a truck on purpose, that ought not count on a CSA score.
Finally, if a highway overpass suddenly collapses in front of a truck, causing property damage and injury — a DOT recordable event — don’t list that as a positive indicator of crashes to come.
