FMCSA to Disclose Crash Data Despite Delay of Fault Rulings
This story appears in the April 9 print edition of Transport Topics.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration plan to soon make public the number of fatal accidents in which individual carriers are involved has intensified industry concern over FMCSA’s recent delay of its plan for determining whether the carrier was at fault in each of the accidents.
Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for American Trucking Associations, said the concern is that, while the agency is apparently willing to make public more information on fatal accidents — information that may be detrimental to a carrier — at the same time, it is either unwilling or unable to make a determination of who is at fault for accidents, information that could help a carrier’s safety record.
The planned breakout of fatality numbers is part of a slate of FMCSA changes to its Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.
The fatality numbers previously have been listed in a joint “injuries/crashes” entry in each carrier’s CSA safety score, “Summary of Activities.” While carriers are currently permitted to review their numbers, the change in the safety rating program is set to go public in July.
While it welcomed several of a slate of agency changes to the CSA program’s Safety Measurement System announced last month, Abbott said the new breakout of fatal and injury accident numbers has heightened ATA’s concerns over FMCSA’s controversial decision to delay its review of how it assigns fault in truck-related crashes.
The agency’s crash accountability program is intended to accurately identify a carrier as “accountable” or “not accountable” for a crash.
FMCSA originally planned to detail the crash accountability program in an announcement last month. But at the last minute, Administrator Anne Ferro said she delayed the program to conduct “additional research and analysis to determine the feasibility of different weighting for crashes in SMS based on an objective set of criteria.”
Ferro, speaking last month at the Mid-America Trucking Show, said the agency was close to proposing a crash accountability plan but had delayed the plan after members of an FMCSA advisory committee asked questions about the reliability of police accident reports that Ferro said she “frankly, found tough to answer.”
ATA officials, unhappy with Ferro’s decision, has urged the agency to quickly answer all the questions and to move forward soon on a plan to remove crashes from carriers’ and drivers’ safety records where they are easily identified as not being at fault or unable to prevent.
“FMCSA contends there are ‘serious questions’ about the reliability of police accident reports to prevent having trained, experienced contractors make crash accountability determinations but does not believe it is a problem to post the details of crashes from these same police reports on the Internet and allow the public to draw their own conclusions,” Abbott told Transport Topics.
“And, now, based on ‘stakeholder requests,’ the agency has proposed to shine an even brighter light on carrier-involved fatal crashes without any sort of caveat warning readers about fault or accountability. This is a profoundly unbalanced approach,” Abbott said.
But an FMCSA spokeswoman said the agency implemented the change “to improve transparency after hearing from industry stakeholders that having only one number incorporating both fatal and injury crashes could give the impression companies have a higher number of fatal crashes than they actually have.”
Ferro said that the agency is still planning on implementing a crash accountability program. But she added, “It is a fact that past crash history, regardless of fault or preventability, is a very strong predictor — one of the strongest predictors of a future crash outcome. That’s what the data says.”
“What we don’t know is if isolating just preventable crashes gives us an even clearer focus on the most unsafe carriers,” Ferro said in her speech at MATS. “If it doesn’t show or demonstrate a higher risk, is it worth the investment of the public’s money and this kind of an effort?”
Abbott said it’s essential that the agency differentiate on a carrier’s safety record those crashes in which the driver or carrier were not at fault or could not have prevented.
“There are some crashes that are on their face so plainly evident that these complaints on the reliability of police reports simply aren’t valid,” Abbott said.
