FMCSA Promises Changes in Fleet Safety Evaluations

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

LAS VEGAS — Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration officials told trucking executives here they should prepare for radical changes in how the agency evaluates the safety of fleets, beginning next year.

FMCSA said its revised safety fitness rating system — known as CSA 2010 or Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 — will be implemented in the second half of next year and provide more opportunities for the agency to rate carriers based on a variety of safety-related factors.

“Every month, the CSA 2010 safety measurement system will use roadside inspection violations and crash reports to monitor,

evaluate and establish a carrier’s safety performance rating,” Rose McMurray, acting administrator, told members of American Trucking Associations’ board of directors Oct. 7 during the Management Conference & Exhibition.

Bill Quade, FMCSA’s associate administrator for enforcement and program delivery, said by using roadside violations and crash reports to generate safety ratings, the agency will be able to give more carriers an accurate grade.

FMCSA currently “only assesses a safety rating after a compliance review,” he said, noting that the agency conducts 12,000 to 14,000 reviews each year.

“Under CSA 2010, as we have it envisioned . . . there will be safety assessments on monthly basis . . . rating as many as 250,000 carriers monthly, providing dynamic, real-time assessments of safety.”

Gary Woodford, FMCSA’s program manager in charge of CSA 2010, said that because compliance reviews are currently so time-intensive, the agency generally sees “less than 2% of the industry.”

“It is a limitation of the current system, and we want to try and change that,” he said.

To change the system, CSA 2010 will give enforcement officers “a toolbox of interventions,” ranging from warning letters and on-site reviews to fines and other penalties.

FMCSA said it hopes to publish a proposed rule laying out the process in January. The new rating system would change monthly, because a SafeStat score generated from a compliance review may take years to change and not fully encompass a carrier’s safety level, Woodford said.

Under the program, violations would be divided into seven categories: unsafe driving, fatigued driving, driver fitness, substance abuse, vehicle maintenance, cargo-related violations and crash indicators. They then would be weighted, based on links to the causes of crashes.

Using those data, Woodford said, officers would “spend a little bit more time with the carrier to help the carrier [identify] the root cause of the safety problem.”

“We don’t want to collect money; that’s not our goal. Our goal as a safety agency is to achieve compliance,” he said.

“Depending on your safety performance, we’ll choose which safety intervention is most appropriate,” he added. “It is possible . . . that the way this is drafted that you could get an adverse rating based on one of those [violation types], one that has a strong, strong link to crash causation.”

Woodford said the agency plans to begin training and setting up enforcement protocols toward the end of July and then, “July through December, we’re going to roll out the interventions” in all 50 states.

Some states already are using the CSA 2010 model as part of a continuing field test, said Max Strathman, FMCSA’s division administrator in Kansas.

Strathman said that Colorado, Georgia, Missouri and New Jersey have been evaluating some carriers using the CSA 2010 model since 2008.

More recently, Montana and Minnesota began using the program, while Kansas and Maryland plan to do the same later this fall.

In evaluating the test, he said that “so far, CSA 2010 is reaching its goal.”

As part of the test, Strathman said agents have “sent out 4,000 letters . . . and 45% of the recipients are logging on to look at their data and evaluate their performance.”

However, the program is not without issues.

Patricia Olsgard, the director of safety for the Colorado Motor Carriers Association, said there was a concern that FMCSA planned to use the number of trucks a fleet has, rather than its miles traveled, to evaluate a company when the agency generated the ratings.

“The number of units that you have changes much more often than your vehicle miles traveled,” she said, adding there was not yet a way to include whether a carrier was at fault in a crash as part of the evaluation.