FMCSA Moving Too Slowly on Safety, NTSB Chair Says

This story appears in the July 12 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON —The head of the National Transportation Safety Board said her agency is concerned about what it sees as the slow pace of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in instituting needed changes.

“There were many things that were required [of FMCSA by Congress] that didn’t get done in a timely way, or they didn’t get done until they were either taken to court or it was a condition of getting an appropriations bill” through Congress, Chairwoman Deborah A.P. Hersman said.

Hersman, who is entering her second year as head of the NTSB, spoke here in a June 25 interview with Transport Topics.

She cited long-delayed rules such as the merging of the commercial driver’s license with a medical certificate, expanding the use of electronic onboard record-ers and revising the agency’s medical regulations as examples of issues on which FMCSA should have acted faster.

“We’ve seen them establish a medical review board, but they haven’t acted on any of the recommendations from the medical review board,” Hersman said.

FMCSA, she said, “want[s] to move in the right direction” but just has not finished the job.

Hersman also raised concerns about the slow pace the agency has taken with the CSA safety ratings program, which dates back to when she first joined the NTSB in 2004.

“I remember being fairly frustrated because they were having these listening sessions on CSA 2010,” she said, “and thinking: ‘They know what they need to do. Why do they need to go and conduct all these listening sessions when we’ve known for 15 years what needs to be changed?’ ”

It was frustrating, she said, that FMCSA the agency told the board it would need six years to tackle some of its recommendations as part of CSA 2010.

“And now,” Hersman said, “we’re six years later . . . and it is not up and running.”

Despite those concerns, Hersman said NTSB still wants FMCSA to push ahead with CSA, even as industry executives and members of Congress questioned the agency’s timeline (6-28, p. 3; click here for previous story).

“I think the safety board’s primary concern is that all of this could have been worked on a decade ago, so don’t let your failure to plan and execute become my crisis here at the end,” she said.

Hersman, who was a congressional staffer when FMCSA was set up, said there was concern that federal regulators — at that time in the Federal Highway Administration — could not effectively monitor the trucking industry

because lawmakers “didn’t think the attention was there.”

“I think what’s important to think about is that, in 1999, the real pressure to create FMCSA was because there was a lot of concern that [FHWA regulators] were too close to the industry and that the highway construction functions within FHWA really didn’t put the appropriate emphasis on motor carrier safety,” she said.

Even with the agency’s shortcomings, Hersman said, FMCSA has taken steps to improve trucking safety, although it needs to move more quickly.

“They’re going in the right direction in a lot of things,” she said. “They are showing effort, and they’re showing progress, but I think the challenge is that every day that they don’t finish these rulemakings, every day that things are not changed, that’s another day where people are at risk on the highways.

“To us, the progress has just not been satisfactory,” she said.

As a result, several items on NTSB’s list of most-wanted safety improvements directed at FMCSA — including revisions to the hours-of-service rules, requiring the use of electronic onboard recorders and preventing unqualified drivers from operating trucks — are tagged with a red light signifying an “unacceptable response.”

Hersman acknowledged that FMCSA’s task was, in some ways, more difficult than the challenges faced by other regulatory agencies.

“In the last 10 years, we’ve seen four administrators at FMCSA, and I know that there’s a lot of good people over there that really are working hard to make the industry safer,” Hersman said. “But they really have a challenge much like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill when you compare them to any other modal administration.

“They have orders of magnitude higher drivers — millions of drivers instead of thousands. They have hundreds of thousands of trucking companies that they have to oversee,” she said.

An FMCSA spokeswoman told TT that the agency has 1,080 employees. By comparison, the Federal Aviation Administration has roughly 47,000 employees — including air traffic controllers. The Federal Transit Administration and Federal Railroad Administration have about 500 and 800 employees, respectively.