Hill Says FMCSA to Begin Pilot Program of Compliance Review System Next Year
By Amy McMahon, Special to Transport Topics
This story appears in the July 23 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
WASHINGTON — John Hill, head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, said the agency expects to launch a pilot program of its overhauled compliance review and safety rating process during 2008.
The overhaul, known as the Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010, is aimed at producing a “more targeted data review process,” Hill said in a recent interview with Transport Topics.
“We think that CSA 2010 will be a better rating methodology than the one we’re currently working with,” Hill said. CSA 2010 would shrink the safety rating process from a three-tiered rating system of satisfactory, conditional and unsatisfactory, to a two-tiered rating of just satisfactory and unsatisfactory.
The current compliance review process requires investigators to examine “every aspect of regulations,” Hill said, a process that can divert resources away from conducting more reviews.
Under the CSA proposal, inspectors would target their audit to a limited part of a carrier’s business, rather than reviewing the entire operation.
Improved data from carriers, as well as better information from roadside inspection records, could help identify potential problem areas more quickly under CSA 2010, allowing investigators to thoroughly inspect compliance in those areas while avoiding inspection areas not identified as problematic.
FMCSA “would actually figure out how [a carrier] should be rated based on the existing data that we have,” Hill said.
For example, Hill said a trucking company can be doing “a fairly reasonable job” and abiding by most requirements, but investigators are compelled to examine all areas, including maintenance and safety procedures.
However, perhaps carriers “aren’t doing their post-trip and pre-trip inspections like they should be; therefore, there’s equipment on the road that shouldn’t be,” he said.
Pinpointing that “real problem” under CSA 2010 would allow FMCSA to “narrow our investigative and enforcement regime to address that [situation],” Hill said.
He added that CSA 2010 will include an appeals process for carriers who want to challenge their rating.
FMCSA first unveiled plans for the overhaul in 2004, after the Department of Transportation announced an initiative to cut annual truck-related fatalities by 41% by the end of 2008 (9-27-04, p. 2). The agency is currently preparing regulatory documents to implement the plan, and Hill said it was “very close” to selecting one state in each of FMCSA’s four regional service centers to conduct pilot studies.
By “testing [CSA 2010] alongside our existing systems, [we’ll] try to get a sense of the impact that these changes will have on our enforcement community and on the regulated community itself,” Hill said.
An agency spokeswoman said the rules associated with CSA 2010 would likely be made public next summer.
Trucking industry officials said they hoped the overhaul would lead to improvements in the rating process.
Dave Osiecki, vice president of safety, security and operations for American Trucking Associations, told TT the federation “has been advocating since the late 1990s for the creation of a new database. . . . there is a need for a national database.”
By improving the data and the rating systems, Osiecki said he expected CSA 2010 to essentially “streamline” and improve the compliance review procedure.
FMCSA’s data has been called into question by studies of its SafeStat program by the DOT inspector general and the Government Accountability Office (7-2, p. 1; 6-18, p. 5).
Hill noted the enormous growth in the motor carrier population in recent years, now at about 700,000, but currently, reviews are only conducted on a small amount of the population.
Steve Keppler, policy and program director for the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, said he hoped CSA 2010 would result in enforcement agencies being able to better “differentiate the good from the bad.”
CSA 2010 could target problem areas with better information to more effectively allocate their resources, Keppler said.
