FMCSA Relies on Challenges by Carriers to Refine States’ Accident Data, Official Says

This story appears in the May 16 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON — Reports from states on commercial vehicle accidents are so inconsistent that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration probably will rely on carriers to challenge findings of who was at fault, a top agency official told the National Transportation Safety Board last week.

“The crash data we receive from the states today doesn’t have a preventability or accountability determination on it,” said Bryan Price, an FMCSA senior transportation specialist who oversees the agency’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program. “In other words, we just get a raw accident report from the state that says ‘XYZ Trucking was involved in a crash.’ We don’t know whether that crash was their fault or whether it was the fault of another party like a passenger vehicle.”

Price, who spoke at a two-day NTSB forum here, said that because the agency has quality, consistency and accuracy concerns about state motor vehicle accident data, it

would not make carrier safety fitness determinations available for public view until it can verify whether a carrier was at fault in a crash listed in CSA program records.

Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for American Trucking Associations, told the NTSB that ATA supports the CSA program, but that CSA’s “single greatest weakness” is state accident data transmitted to FMCSA.

Abbott said the state data don’t inform the agency who is at fault in an accident and can paint an inaccurate picture of a carrier’s “likelihood of future crash involvement.”

“Those who are falsely indicted feel that the system is very inaccurate,” Abbott said. “There’s some genuine concern there.”

Price told the panel that FMCSA is “working on some solutions now, both short term and long term, that will allow us hopefully at some point to have accountability or preventability information associated with our crashes so that we can get that information out for public view.”

Over the long term, FMCSA would like to have support staff who could make an accountability determination for each of the 120,000 to 140,000 commercial vehicle crash reports forwarded to the agency, Price said.

In the meantime, Price said, the agency will continue to plug crash data into the CSA measurement system “unless you, as a motor carrier, can provide us a police accident report whereby we can take a look at that particular crash.”

The data being questioned are part of the agency’s CSA program, which was rolled out in late 2010 and updates rankings monthly in several driver and carrier safety performance categories called BASICs. The CSA program also will assign safety fitness ratings for carriers, gradually replacing FMCSA’s SafeStat system.

The NTSB forum was held May 10-11 in order to bring the federal transportation watchdog agency up to date on improvements in trucking safety over the past decade and explore challenges the industry faces now and will continue to face in the future.

NTSB staff and board members also were briefed on bus and trucking trade group positions on issues ranging from CSA to proposed rules on hours of service and onboard electronic logging devices.

ATA’s Abbott reported inconsistencies in the manner, frequency and timeliness with which states report accident data.

“Some states report 80% or 90% of their vehicle crashes, while others report less than 30% of vehicle crashes,” Abbott said. “That’s a real problem because we’re comparing carriers from both” types of state databases.

Stephen Keppler, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, told NTSB that motor carriers already are filing challenges in large numbers with FMCSA’s electronic “DataQs system” that forwards data concerns to the appropriate office for resolution.

The system also allows filers to monitor the status of each challenge.

“Probably the biggest issue has been the data challenges in the DataQs system that has resulted from the statistical measurement system being launched,” Keppler said. “What our members tell us is that last year versus this year, on average they’re experiencing about 200% to 300% more data challenges now.”

Keppler said carriers are “flooding the system with challenges really without merit in some cases.”

“We’re working to educate the industry about what’s appropriate and what’s not,” Keppler told NTSB.

Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, also expressed concerns about the accident data.

“We are real concerned that the data we’re looking at, focusing on and really drilling down on, may or may not have a correlation with who’s crashing trucks — who’s actually causing problems on the highway,” Spencer told NTSB. “Much of the data is totally open to misinterpretation.”

NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt, who was chairman of the forum, said the fatality rate for heavy vehicle accidents has been dropping steadily since 2005.

“I can’t help but believe that this is largely due to the safety efforts of everyone assembled here,” Sumwalt said.