Senior Reporter
FMCSA Says Report Supports CSA
The report also showed that the agency is able to identify those high-risk carriers that continue to have crash rates that are twice the national average, FMCSA said in a statement.
The report was in response to a House of Representatives directive that called on FMCSA to specifically identify the limitations in data used to calculate Safety Measurement System scores as well as limitations in resulting SMS scores.
“In examining commercial motor vehicle crash rates, FMCSA looked at carriers of various sizes in accordance with the congressional directive,” the statement said. “The analysis revealed no significant difference in actual crash rates between small carriers and those with 20 or more roadside inspections."
FMCSA’s examinations further determined that the category of carriers with 11 to 20 inspections and patterns of noncompliance has the highest crash rates.
In a report last year, the Government Accountability Office said the agency should revise part of its CSA program because of limits on access to needed data.
The GAO report said the SMS, a key part of the CSA program, faces challenges because “most regulations used to calculate SMS scores are not violated often enough to strongly associate them with crash risk for individual carriers.”
GAO, a congressional investigative agency, also said “most carriers lack sufficient safety performance data to ensure that FMCSA can reliably compare them with other carriers.”
“FMCSA continues to be in denial over the GAO's findings with respect to the reliability and accuracy of CSA scores,” said Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for American Trucking Associations. “For instance, they ignore the fact that enforcement differences from one state to another can cause fleets to be erroneously labeled as comparatively unsafe based on where they operate.
“Further, they claim the goal of the system is not to predict the future crash rates of individual carriers but don't realize that publicly available scores make such an implication.”
Also, carriers with consistently low crash rates have undeserved high scores due to a host of data and methodology problems, Abbott added.
