FMCSA Panel to Look at CSA Issues

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has asked its advisory committee to examine concerns about the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program’s roadside violation severity weightings.

At a meeting this month, FMCSA officials asked members of the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee to make sure that CSA severity weights the agency assigns to certain violations is an accurate predictor of a motor carrier’s crash risk.

Specifically, FMCSA asked the committee to determine if the individual roadside violations are in the correct violation grouping, and to rank each violation group in the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs, in priority of crash risk.

Then using the priority rankings, FMCSA wants the committee to evaluate the likely crash risk associated with each violation grouping, ranking them as high, medium or low.

The committee is expected to report back to the agency by the end of August, said David Parker, the committee’s chairman.