Editorial: Park the CSA Scores (for Now)

Being held responsible for one’s actions is often not pleasant or convenient, but as any reasonable adult should admit, there is logic to that rule and following it usually makes the world a better place.

This principle is what underlies a recent petition sent to Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, asking him to direct the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to fix the flawed Safety Measurement System and, until that happens, to stop posting the SMS scores online. (See related story.)

The Aug. 22 letter to Foxx was signed by leaders of 10 trade associations representing all aspects the nation’s motor carrier industry — trucks and buses. They told the secretary they support FMCSA’s Comprehensive, Safety, Accountability program, of which SMS is a part, but also reminded him that Congress’ Government Accountability Office found that CSA is not working as intended.

There are statistical problems with the numbers that get collected and then crunched into seven safety scores for motor carriers.

American Trucking Associations, the National Private Truck Council, National Tank Truck Carriers, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and the Truckload Carriers Association were among the signatories. These groups are filled with people who work tremendously hard to operate their commercial vehicles safely. The recent truck driving championships in Pittsburgh were an example of that.

There are several problems with the scores. First, they scoop up data that are easily collected and measured, but this produces scores that don’t correlate significantly with causing danger. That means some careful carriers are erroneously branded as unsafe when they’re not involved in accidents.

The other half of the poor-correlation coin is even worse, in that unsafe carriers are unjustly praised for good performance.

GAO looked at 750 violations that are tracked in CSA and found that only 13 rules had been violated enough that they could be analyzed thoroughly. Of those 13, only two violation categories were found to correlate strongly with crash risk, the report said.

Another issue is that many carriers — GAO says more than 70% — have not generated enough data to be assigned a score.

Do keep CSA as an incentive to improve safety performance and use it internally; it’s a noble idea. But until SMS is improved and thoroughly reliable, park the scores by the side of the road.

Once the scores are fixed properly, that is the time to post them. Carriers should be held accountable for their real safety performance.