Study Blasts CSA BASICs
This story appears in the Oct. 8 print edition of Transport Topics.
Motor carrier scores in two of the five public safety categories in the federal government’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program are “defective” in predicting crash risk, according to a new study.
“There is no statistical support for making intended safety inferences based upon the Driver Fitness or Controlled Substances and Alcohol percentile rankings. In fact, carriers with higher scores in these two BASICs seem to present lower crash risks,” according to the study by the American Transportation Research Institute.
The new study of 471,000 fleets’ safety measurement data also said that CSA carrier “alerts” from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration do not consistently identify the riskiest carriers.
“It’s more than troubling to discover that the safer your score, as in the lower your score, the higher your crash rate,” Dan Murray, vice president of research for ATRI told Transport Topics.
One or both of the defective BASICs are “beyond problematic” and in need of “major re-evaluation and recalibration,” Murray said.
However, ATRI’s detailed analysis of CSA program scores and federal crash data also found “high levels of confidence” in predicting crash risk in the other three public safety categories, known as Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs.
There is “ample evidence” to support FMCSA’s methodology for assigning scores to the Unsafe Driving, Fatigued Driving and Vehicle Maintenance BASICs because scores in those three BASICs accurately reflect crash risk, the study said. Scores in those three BASICs were more accurate predictors of crash risk, with the strongest relationship in the Unsafe Driving category, the study said.
The study also concluded that in four of the five public BASICs, carriers with an “alert” had crash rates exceeding those of carriers in all other groups.
“The one exception was Driver Fitness, where below-threshold carriers posed greater safety risks,” the study said.
Rob Abbott, vice president of safety for American Trucking Associations, said it’s also important to note that ATRI’s study was limited to publicly available BASICs.
“Scores in the current Cargo-Related BASIC and future Hazmat Compliance BASIC that will replace it are also not related to crash risk,” Abbott told TT. “Coupled with the ATRI findings, we can conclude that scores in at least three of the seven measurement categories — 43% of the system — don’t reflect crash risk. That’s a significant problem.”
Two of the seven carrier BASICs, the Cargo Related (soon to be renamed Hazmat Compliance BASIC) and Crash Indicator BASICs, cannot be viewed by the public and therefore were not analyzed by ATRI.
The CSA program, which was designed to replace FMCSA’s SafeStat program, relies on a measurement system that ranks motor-carrier safety performance relative to other carriers that have similar levels of on-road exposure.
An FMCSA spokesman said ATRI’s findings “reinforce that CSA is a positive change for safety.”
“The agency is conducting an in-depth review of ATRI’s analysis and will consider this information as we work to further strengthen our ability to identify unsafe carriers and address safety problems before crashes occur,” the spokesman said.
In the past, agency officials have called the CSA program “a work in progress.”
Scott Mugno, vice president of safety for FedEx Ground, who testified last month on behalf of ATA at a congressional hearing on CSA, said the trucking industry generally supports CSA but that ATRI’s research “identifies a key weakness in FMCSA’s safety measurement system.”
“The conclusions in ATRI’s study support what many motor carriers have found to be true in their operations — namely, that scores in the CSA’s Driver Fitness BASIC do not bear a statistical correlation to crash risk,” Mugno said in a statement.
Murray said BASICs scores are very important to the trucking industry, not only because bad ratings can draw enforcement attention from FMCSA but also because many shippers and brokers use them to help identify which carriers are safe.
A first step toward correcting the flawed scores would be to increase the availability of information for all motor carriers, ATRI said.
FMCSA has said that only about 200,000 of the more than 500,000 active carriers it regulates have enough roadside inspections or crash data to be scored in at least one of the BASICs.
ATRI said that carriers with sufficient roadside inspection data, but no BASIC scores, are just as safe as and even present a slightly lower crash risk than carriers with scores below FMCSA’s percentile thresholds.
“This is particularly important since many shippers, brokers and other trucking stakeholders currently perceive the SMS (Safety Measurement System) to only indicate safety when a carrier possesses a below-threshold score,” the study said.
