Moving Ahead on CSA
This week’s issue of Transport Topics includes some interesting news about the federal government’s new safety regime for trucking, Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010, including that the program is going to be renamed.
During testimony on Capitol Hill last week, Anne Ferro, head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, revealed that the safety program is going to be known by its initials without any numbers, which now will stand for Compliance, Safety and Accountability.
At the same time, Ferro said that the agency is “absolutely” committed to the current timeline for implementing CSA. The safety program has had its implementation date pushed back several times during its evolution.
Despite concerns expressed by some House members during a hearing, Ferro said CSA is on “a component-oriented timeline to ensure that everyone is with us every step of the way and that we get every piece of it right every step of the way.”
While American Trucking Associations strongly supports FMCSA’s new safety program, we continue to be concerned about three primary issues involving CSA:
• We urge FMCSA to determine whether a fleet’s driver is responsible for any truck-involved crash before entering that crash into the fleet’s CSA safety record;
• We believe vehicle miles traveled is the appropriate measure for FMCSA to use in determining a fleet’s crash exposure instead of the number of tractors; and
• We ask that the program focus only on actual traffic citations and not on “warnings” issued by law enforcement agencies.
Another story this week raises an additional issue, namely whether fleets may potentially be punished for training their owner-operators in how to comply with CSA requirements.
A lawyer who specializes in trucking industry issues told us recently that there is a line where “you’re starting to provide [drivers] a set of core skills that really starts to look like you’re an employer and they are an employee.”
This distinction could create a serious problem for fleets that use independent drivers, especially at a time when the Obama administration has said it intends to actively pursue cases in which companies improperly claim that workers are independent contractors instead of employees.
While it’s nice to have FMCSA officials saying on the record that they don’t expect fleets to be penalized for providing driver safety training, it would be nice to hear the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor publicly agree.
