Trucking’s CSA Concerns Are Justified, Studies Claim

The trucking industry’s widely held concerns that recent changes to the federal safety-rating program are causing sudden, dramatic shifts in some carriers’ scores is justified, according to an analysis by several companies that help fleets manage their safety programs.

Changes to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s new Compliance, Safety, Accountability program included moving cargo securement violations to the vehicle maintenance category and creating a new stand-alone hazardous materials category.

As a result, a trend has emerged: lower hazmat scores for some carriers that haul hazardous materials full time — indicating greater safety — but raised scores for others that do not haul hazmat frequently — indicating less safety, said Tom Bray, editor of transportation management for J.J. Keller & Associates Inc., Neenah, Wis.

“The carriers that are likely to have trouble are the ones that are in an environment where they occasionally haul hazmat but have enough inspections to meet the standard to get a score,” Bray told Transport Topics. “But because their drivers don’t tend to haul it a lot, they get a lot of little violations, and when you compare the number of inspections with the number of violations, they look worse.”

An FMCSA spokeswoman said last week the agency was still reviewing changes to CSA.

“We are in the public preview period for the proposed CSA Safety Measurement System enhancements. The agency encourages the public to submit their comments to the Federal Register official docket. The agency will carefully review all comments as it works to sharpen CSA as an effective safety tool,” the spokeswoman said.

Bray said the analysis also has shown that moving cargo securement violations to the vehicle maintenance category has improved the scores of many flatbed carriers in the revamped vehicle maintenance category. The result could be that some less-safe carriers with cargo securement violations will dodge FMCSA scrutiny, he said.

Bray said he is not convinced that changes in the category will result in accurately measuring how safe a carrier is.

“If the goal is to score a carrier on how good they do at transporting hazmat materials, then the new BASIC [Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category] is going to work the way they want it to,” Bray said. “Whether or not that relates to how safe the carrier is: That’s the issue.”

“I have sympathy for the bias that has been unfairly applied to the flatbed carriers because of the nature of what they do,” Steven Bryan, founder and CEO of Vigillo LLC, a Portland, Ore., company that helps truckers adhere to CSA provisions, told TT. “But what they’ve [FMCSA] done is taken the cargo securement violations and virtually erased them. They’ve dissolved them in this vast ocean of vehicle maintenance, where they will never be seen again.”

An analysis by a third firm, EBE Technologies Inc., East Moline, Ill., also found that “flatbed carriers will clearly benefit from this change,” said Cindy Nelson, a company vice president.

Both Bray and Bryan said they based their conclusions on a crunching of their own databases and an FMCSA information collection on accidents, violations and inspections.

Bryan said that cargo securement violations of his more than 2,000 trucker clients used to be the No. 1 violation in the former cargo-related category, but it has dropped to No. 41 in the revised vehicle maintenance category or BASIC.

As for the new hazmat category, Bryan said FMCSA has created a new BASIC that is “almost entirely based on paperwork and placarding.”

“I don’t lie awake nights worrying about whether anybody has 26 versus the required 28 placards on their truck,” Bryan said. “An unsecured 6-ton roll of steel does keep me awake.”

Bray said that when cargo securement violations were included in the cargo BASIC, they made up 82% of the violations in that segment.

“By moving them into the vehicle maintenance BASIC they’re only 4% of the violations,” Bray said. “So the value of them has been diluted, and the end result of that is, for a flatbed carrier to be in trouble, he has to have some significant problems with securement.”

The CSA process is designed to sort each carrier’s roadside inspection violations and crashes into seven BASICs.

The violations are weighted for severity and how recently they occurred, and they are totaled for driver and carrier safety scores that are used to help FMCSA determine which carriers need agency intervention.

Rob Abbott, vice present of safety policy for American Trucking Associations, said many carriers that have reported scores fluctuations in the hazmat category have otherwise stellar safety scores.

John Conley, president of the National Tank Truck Carriers trade group, said he is hearing similar reports that many of his members are seeing their hazmat scores improve.