Effect of Trucking Safety Rules Was Felt in 2011

Trucking familiarized itself with the federal government’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program in 2011, discovering major changes the safety program causes within the industry and its partners.

CSA’s safety measurement system (SMS) website launched in December 2010, giving carriers and the public a look at safety ratings based on inspection and violation data from law enforcement.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, meanwhile, took industry feedback as it considered minor revisions to make CSA a more effective tool to rate carriers’ safety, focus law enforcement activities and help carriers improve their own safety practices, among other goals.

CSA rates carriers in seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs. Each BASIC has a threshold, above which FMCSA marks the carrier as having enough violations to warrant agency intervention.

Carriers learned early on that CSA would affect their insurance rates in some way, but industry and insurance representatives did not know in January whether it would be positive or negative.

Intermodal fleets criticized CSA early on, complaining in February that their scores are hurt by drivers who no longer drive for the company.

“I’m getting punished for doing things right,” Kevin Lhotak, president of Reliable Transportation Specialists, said of his decision to get rid of unsafe owner-operators. Driver infractions stay on a carrier’s record for 24 months after they happen.

The symbol FMCSA uses on SMS to denote carriers exceeding the intervention threshold changed in March from an orange “alert” sign to a yellow triangle with an exclamation point, and the agency added an explanation of what the symbol means.

The move was to settle a lawsuit by the National Association of Small Trucking companies, which originally sought to have SMS closed from public view.

The Truckload Carriers Association threw its weight behind CSA in March, with the group’s incoming and outgoing chairmen both saying it improved safety.

“CSA will be a good thing for the industry,” Chairman Gary Salisbury said during TCA’s annual meeting.

Salisbury acknowledged some drawbacks of the program, including a tightening of the supply of drivers and of capacity.

FMCSA signaled its intent to listen to industry concerns about CSA in June, when it told its Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee to look at the severity weights of carrier violations under the program.

It wanted to make sure violations are in the right groupings and are prioritized correctly as well. MCSAC is an advisory group representing industry, safety and labor advocates, insurance and other stakeholders.

Accolades for CSA continued in September, when the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute announced the results of its two-year test that included states where the program started early.

UMTRI found CSA to be a significant improvement over the previous program, SafeStat, in identifying unsafe carriers.

But the Government Accountability Office concluded in October that FMCSA’s delays in fully implementing the program were undercutting its effectiveness. Specifically, FMCSA has not used CSA to assign carrier safety fitness determinations, it said.

“Until the rulemaking is completed, FMCSA will not realize one of its most important goals for CSA — enhancing its ability to assign safety fitness determinations to a significantly greater portion of the motor carrier industry than it currently is able to do,” the report said.

FMCSA said it plans to propose the safety determination rule in February 2012 and have it finalized sometime in 2013.

But CSA ended the year on a positive note, when a November report from the American Transportation Research Institute found most trucking companies to favor it over SafeStat.