Industry Rejects CSA Study Defending Crash-Risk Data

Despite ongoing trucking industry concerns over the crash predictability of the federal government’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, regulators have released a new report they say confirms CSA is doing a good job of identifying unsafe motor carriers.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration report, made public Oct. 8, concluded that CSA’s Safety Measurement System is able to identify truck and bus companies involved in 90% of more than 100,000 crashes each year.

In particular, the report said the agency can determine the high¬risk carriers that have crash rates twice the national average. The report was issued in response to a congressional directive that called on FMCSA to specifically identify limitations in data used to calculate SMS scores and to implement recommendations included in a critical Government Accountability Office report on CSA’s scoring system.

Susan Fleming, director of GAO’s physical infrastructure team, said Oct. 15 she was unconvinced that the data have a strong predictive relationship with crashes.

“GAO stands by our previous work and our recommendation that FMCSA should revise the SMS methodology to better account for limitations we found in drawing comparisons of safety performance across carriers, particularly in regard to the precision and confidence of those scores,” Fleming said. “FMCSA did not concur with our recommendations and has not taken steps to revise the SMS methodology in ways that we think would improve their ability to identify carriers at greatest risk of crashing.”

In a 2014 report, GAO said “most regulations used to calculate SMS scores are not violated often enough to strongly associate them with crash risk for individual carriers.” That report also said most carriers lack sufficient safety performance data to ensure that the agency can reliably compare them with other carriers.

Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for American Trucking Associations, said FMCSA is in denial over GAO’s findings.

“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,” Abbott said. “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, some carriers with consistently low crash rates have undeserved high scores due to a host of data and methodology problems, Abbott added.

Dan Murray, vice president of research for the American Transportation Research Institute, said FMCSA has yet to make needed changes.

“I don’t see anything in there that they’ve done new and different to modify the system to make it accurate,” Murray told Transport Topics. “They’re defending a system that multiple channels have shown at least flawed, if not ineffective.”

In its report, FMCSA said it examined commercial crash rates of carriers of various sizes.

“The analysis revealed no significant difference in actual crash rates between small carriers and those with 20 or more roadside inspections,” FMCSA said.

FMCSA’s examinations further determined the category of carriers with 11 to 20 inspections and patterns of noncompliance has the highest crash rates.

Ed Gilman, FMCSA’s director of external affairs, said the analysis showed that companies in some of the smaller groups that are identified as having safety issues have much higher crash rates than some of the larger categories.

“The agency’s analysis therefore determined that implementing GAO’s recommended data sufficiency standards would be detrimental to public safety,” Gilman said. “The agency’s mission is to be proactive and prevent crashes. Waiting until after a crash to intervene, or until a carrier has 20 inspections with safety problems, is in stark contrast to the agency’s mission.”