The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will delay its plans to implement a much-anticipated Compliance, Safety, Accountability program process that would have allowed carriers to seek an accountability review of crashes that went on their safety records, a top American Trucking Associations safety executive said.
The process would have permitted carriers to request a review that a crash be removed from their safety records if the carrier “could not have prevented the crash,” a higher standard than whether the carrier was at fault, said Rob Abbott, ATA’s vice president of safety policy.
FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro informed a group of bus and truck trade group executives that the change would be delayed “until further notice” in a meeting at the agency’s headquarters on March 8, Abbott said.
An agency spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Originally, the agency had planned to begin the process in late February or early March. However, Ferro told the group, the agency and the secretary of transportation have received feedback from a few public interest groups raising questions about the “reliability of police accident reports” that FMCSA was planning to use as part of the crash accountability determination process.
“It’s very disappointing — and in our view illogical,” Abbott said of the delay. “In certain crashes, it’s unquestionable that those crashes should not be used to prioritize carriers for intervention.”
“It’s poor public policy to do so and results in the agency being less effective in properly prioritizing and identifying carriers that they should take intervention action against,” Abbott said.
