Opinion: Public Safety Must Come First
By Stephen Keppler
Executive Director
Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance
This Opinion piece appears in the Dec. 20 & 27 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Government and law-enforcement agencies at the state and local levels are continuing to be fiscally challenged with respect to resources being made available for highway safety activities.
The public has an expectation — and rightly so — that a basic responsibility of government is to keep our citizens traveling the roadways safe and secure. The challenge, unfortunately, is that, all too often, public safety is one of the first areas of government to be cut when budgets are tight.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance is an international not-for-profit organization comprising local, state, provincial, territorial and federal motor carrier safety officials and industry representatives from the United States, Canada and Mexico. Our mission is to promote commercial motor vehicle safety and security by providing leadership to enforcement, industry and policy makers. The alliance actively monitors, evaluates and identifies solutions for potentially unsafe transportation processes and procedures related to the driver and vehicle safety requirements most often associated with commercial motor vehicle crashes.
CVSA has several hundred associate members who are committed to helping the alliance achieve its goals — uniformity, compatibility and reciprocity of commercial vehicle inspections and enforcement activities throughout North America by individuals dedicated to highway safety and security.
Using performance data to reveal which motor carriers and drivers are not complying with safety rules allows inspectors and other law-enforcement personnel to more effectively focus on and remove the most unsafe drivers, vehicles and carriers from the nation’s roadways, saving countless lives in the process.
CVSA is a strong advocate of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Compliance, Safety and Accountability program’s use of performance data to identify the nation’s most high-risk carriers.
There is clear evidence that links the CSA Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) and its associated Safety Measurement System with the ability to recognize increased crash risk. Providing enforcement with the ability to use these data is common sense and allows them to keep an eagle eye on those who do not comply.
CSA is helping to prioritize carrier interventions through the use of additional metrics more so than in the past — including all safety-based roadside inspection violations, enforcement actions, crash data and violation histories — and will update these data more frequently.
This is good news, as it will allow interventions on high-risk operators to occur sooner than in the past, ultimately saving more lives in the process.
On Aug. 16, FMCSA began providing carriers with information about where they stand with the new CSA Safety Measurement System, based on roadside inspection data and investigation findings.
To date, only 5% of the motor carrier population has viewed their data (available to them online at http://csa2010.fmcsa.dot.gov).
While SafeStat has been an effective safety tool for public and private stakeholders alike — and the data have been publicly available for more than a decade — CSA goes even further in helping to identify carriers with the most severe compliance and performance problems and the greatest need for further attention.
The CSA effectiveness study has revealed that the SMS high-risk carrier list has identified 25% more high-risk carriers who have been involved in 56% more crashes than was the case with the SafeStat high-risk list.
By implementing CSA, federal and state inspectors and investigators are improving their ability to proactively address the issues most likely to contribute to crashes and to cause injuries and deaths related to large truck and bus crashes.
The pilot program experience in the states involved — Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana and New Jersey — has shown we can effectively reach more carriers, which is a good thing and an improvement over what has been the case in the past.
The experience in the pilot states both by enforcement and industry has been very positive, by and large. We wholeheartedly applaud FMCSA for its leadership and for being as transparent as the agency has been with CSA. We appreciate its level of engagement throughout the development of CSA. The agency has brought everyone into the tent to create an environment to help promote government, law enforcement and industry’s common goal of saving lives. This has made — and will continue to make — a difference.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance has headquarters in Greenbelt, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C.
