FMCSA to Weigh Costs, Benefits of Crash Accountability Process

BELLEVUE, Wash. — Examining whether creating a better crash-accountability process would be worth the cost to taxpayers will be part of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s study of ways to assess and assign fault in truck-related crashes, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said in an interview.

Ferro said the study, which FMCSA set after the administrator announced the agency would delay its crash-accountability process to determine fault in carrier crashes, would make CSA a sharper enforcement tool.

“And is it the right use of taxpayer dollars to go through that process on over 100,000 crashes each year? Those are fundamental questions,” Ferro said.

Ferro said she was hopeful the agency’s study will shed light on whether the removal of preventable crashes from a carrier’s crash indicator score will help turn the enforcement spotlight “towards companies with a significantly high crash risk.”

“If it only shifts that indicator minimally, is it the right use of our resources?” she asked. “Our theory is that it does. Our theory is that isolating those crashes that are preventable does brighten the spotlight on the highest of the high risks. But we haven’t tested that theory.”

By the end of the year, the agency’s study also aims to answer whether a crash accountability process would actually improve the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program’s focus on truck-crash predictability, Ferro said.

She spoke in an April 24 interview with Transport Topics at a joint meeting here of FMCSA and Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance leaders.

“We’re getting at the heart of the questions that people have asked,” Ferro said. “Which is: what’s the process going to be? How reliable a source is the police accident record? How do I make sure that if I’m the party that was hit that I have an opportunity to comment on an appeal?’ ”

In March, Ferro announced that she was delaying the agency’s review of the CSA program’s crash-accountability process. (3-12, p. 29).

FMCSA originally had said it would set up the process to review accountability determinations in February or March, and Ferro’s announcement both surprised and discouraged truckers who said they were eagerly awaiting details (3-19, p. 1).

Ferro also responded to calls from American Trucking Associations that even if the agency needs to study the crash-accountability process further, it should remove the so-called “no-brainer accidents” — those which it is obvious a motor carrier or driver could not have prevented.

“If I just take a few crashes off for one carrier, what about everybody else?” she asked. “It’s not that we don’t agree that there are some crashes that are nonpreventable. But there also are others that aren’t so easy to determine blame.”

For example, Ferro said that one recent crash, after further examination, revealed that the carrier was owned by a convicted felon.

“It started with a crash that was a fatality that was the passenger car running into the truck,” she said. “Those are the facts of the case.”

But she added, “When our folks went and did a further investigation of the carrier, it turns out that carrier had a business practice of incentivizing drivers to falsify logs across the board. The truck should have never been on the roadway in the first place. They were out of hours.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Ferro also commented on several other issues:

• By early 2013, the agency expects to issue a safety fitness determination rule that will set “hard thresholds” for CSA BASICs scores that could be used to declare a carrier unfit. The current SafeStat system is geared to on-site compliance reviews.

• Ferro said the agency is conducting research into how crash risk changes from hour to hour of driving. However, she emphasized that FMCSA is not seeking to reduce allowable driving hours to 10 from 11. “We’re going to look at it,” Ferro said. “But we’re not going to introduce any changes.”

• There is a general misconception in the trucking industry that the agency plans to make public the CSA Crash Indicator Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category, or BASIC. The Crash Indicator BASIC will remain private, Ferro said.

• Only about 3,000 of the more than 500,000 U.S. carriers have gone onto the FMCSA website to preview how recent CSA changes to the Cargo-Related (now included in the Vehicle Maintenance BASIC) and Hazardous Materials BASICs will impact their safety scores. Ferro said she would urge truckers to view their scores and comment on the changes before a planned July implementation date.

• Pointing to complaints from motor carriers, FMCSA is making the DataQs police-accident-report challenge process a “high-focus area,” instructing states to make sure that they are responsive to requests for review of the reports that carriers believe are inaccurate or incomplete, Ferro said. The agency is “looking at the data in aggregate to identify pockets” where there are inaccurate data transcription problems, she said.