Fair Assessment of Safety

CSA 2010 will become CSA 2011 before all the bricks of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s new safety enforcement structure are set in place.

The agency has extended the rollout of its Comprehensive Safety Analysis, which creates a safety scoring system for drivers and carriers alike. The revised schedule will serve the industry well if FMCSA uses the time to make significant adjustments to its ambitious but flawed blueprint.

Development of CSA 2010 began in 2004, when Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta announced a goal of reducing truck-involved highway deaths by more than 40% and called for a better way of interacting with an estimated three-quarter of a million truck and bus operations.

Last week, FMCSA officials said a key CSA methodology — three-step intervention — won’t reach all states until spring and summer of 2011. That is a year later than originally intended. (Click here for p. 1 story.)

ATA has called for revisions, in the meantime, that would make the new data-driven system more equitable than the SafeStat program it replaces. Perhaps the biggest problem is establishing responsibility for a crash before the crash data are entered into the government’s database.

Currently, crashes for which the truck driver could not reasonably be held accountable make it into FMCSA’s safety scoring, putting terrible blots on carrier and driver records.

Here’s an example:

“Last year, a guy driving a pickup truck fell asleep at the wheel on the interstate, crossing the median and two lanes of traffic before crashing into one of our rigs and killing himself,” recalled William Usher Jr., president of Usher Transport, Louisville, Ky.

In an interview with Transport Topics, Usher said his driver was one of the company’s best, with a long string of clean inspections and no previous accidents or spills.

“There’s no way he was even remotely at fault. But [he] now has 117 points against him, and his career could be in jeopardy. We intend to plead his case, and ours, since my company was assessed 100 points that we don’t need and certainly don’t deserve.”

ATA already has complained to FMCSA that lack of accountability not only is unfair, it does nothing to target unsafe carrier and driver behavior.

Crash accountability is not an easy problem to solve, in no small part because crash reports are generated by a wide variety of state and local authorities. Report consistency is elusive.

But fair assessment across the board is due trucking. Ultimately, CSA cannot achieve Mineta’s vision without it.