Trucking Officials Blast FMCSA Over Crash-Fault Review Delay

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s last-minute decision to delay its highly anticipated review of how it assigns fault in truck-related crashes has seriously damaged the agency’s credibility with the trucking industry, according to some industry officials.

In a hastily called, closed-door meeting with truck and bus industry stakeholders March 8, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said the agency would delay its review of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program’s so-called crash accountability process (3-12, p. 29).

Ferro refused to publicly comment on her decision.

Behind closed doors, however, Ferro told the meeting attendees that she personally decided to delay the process after some public-interest groups questioned the “uniformity and consistency” of police accident reports and said they felt the agency should include a way to “accept public input into the process,” according to those who attended the meeting. The crash review had been expected to begin by now.

FMCSA originally had said it would soon set up a process to review accountability determinations, and Ferro’s announcement both surprised and discouraged truckers who were eagerly expecting to hear details this month, said John Conley, president of National Tank Truck Carriers.

“I truly believe that the credibility of the agency will, and should, take a hit,” Conley told Transport Topics.

“I was surprised and very disappointed,” he said.

Joe Rajkovacz, head of regulatory affairs for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, called the agency’s delay an “outrageous kowtowing to safety advocacy groups.”

An FMCSA spokeswoman said the agency determined there were several “critical areas that required further study” before it could proceed with its review.

NTTC’s Conley said, “I’ve defended the CSA program when my members have alleged that FMCSA is out to get us. I’ve told them, ‘Let’s look at what they are doing; they’re listening.’ ”

The FMCSA spokeswoman said areas that needed further study included “establishing a uniform process for making crash determinations, reviewing police accident reports and ensuring public input in the development process.”

“As a result, FMCSA will continue to thoroughly examine these issues as it sharpens CSA as a safety-enforcement tool,” the spokeswoman said. The agency has not given a new timeline for completing the review.

Carriers have raised concerns that crashes are posted on their crash indicator scores even if they were not at fault and that the lack of an accountability determination has the poten-tial to single out a carrier for unwarranted enforcement attention.

The premise of the crash accountability program was to identify crashes for which a carrier has greater responsibility and consider weighing them differently from other crashes in the CSA safety measurement system, according to a memo written by John Drake, FMCSA’s director of government affairs, and e-mailed to stakeholders on March 9.

The agency’s ultimate goal for the crash accountability pro-cess is to code every interstate motor carrier crash as either “accountable” or “not accountable” to the motor carrier and the driver, largely based on police accident reports, according to a recent CSA newsletter.

CSA data currently allow a public view of a carrier’s crashes but do not include details of the crash or whether the carrier or driver was at fault. However, several executives said carriers still must explain those crashes listed on their CSA crash profiles to shippers and brokers seeking to use motor carriers they know have good safety records.

“Yeah, the [CSA] crash BASIC [Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories] is invisible to public viewing, but unfortunately, it’s not invisible to the people you’re doing business with,” said OOIDA’s Rajkovacz.

“One trucker gets involved in a fatal accident. Do you think that any shipper or broker wants to contract with them and wants to wade through what will probably be 20 reams of paper trying to show this guy wasn’t at fault?”

Rajkovacz agreed that FMCSA has “taken a credibility hit” because of the announced delay.

“The idea that we can’t use police accident reports to make some sort of determination is absurd,” Rajkovacz said.

David Osiecki, senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs for American Trucking Associations, said truckers are eager to see that their safety scores accurately reflect those crashes that they could not have prevented or for which they were not at fault.

Osiecki said the agency already has made a policy decision to create an accountability process and could move ahead immediately with fault determinations for crashes where truckers obviously are not to blame.

“The simple part of this is that there are clearly crashes that are black and white,” Osiecki said. “There are wrong-way drivers on interstate highways that run into the front end of trucks. There are trucks that are legally parked and get hit in the rear or some other part of the truck.”

“The administrator said serious questions had been raised about the reliability of police accident reports,” Osiecki added. “That sounds a lot to me like they’re questioning the professionalism and the competence of law enforcement officers that complete these reports.”

Stephen Keppler, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, said that while his organization did not seek a delay, he can understand why FMCSA slowed down the process.

“From our perspective, I think they’re better served to do their diligence and work with people that have some thoughts to share,” Keppler said.

“The police accident reports are reliable; they’re accurate,” Keppler added. “But that’s just one part of a crash investigation.”

Keppler said it’s a law enforcement officer’s responsibility to investigate and report the facts of a crash and identify what could have contributed to that crash.

A crash predictor model developed by the American Transportation Research Institute holds that a driver who is involved in a crash, regardless of fault, has a higher chance of being involved in a subsequent crash, said Rebecca Brewster, president of ATRI.

“Certainly it is understood that the predictability of being involved in a past crash is much higher for those for whom that crash was something they are at fault for,” Brewster told TT.

But she added, “We really do need to take a look at the accountability because it is a flaw in the system to say that a carrier or driver that had no responsibility in a crash should have their score impacted by that crash. It simply is not a fair and equitable system.”