Trucking’s Efforts Produce Changes in CSA Scoring

This story appears in the Dec. 24 & 31 print edition of Transport Topics.

Federal regulators weathered ongoing criticism of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program during the year, as industry representatives, experts and researchers pushed for changes to it.

After mostly praising the program since it started in December 2010, the trucking industry blasted a March decision by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to delay implementing a program that would penalize carriers’ scores differently based on their responsibility for crashes.

At the time, the agency said it found problems with the “uniformity and consistency” of police reports from crashes, which it had planned to use to judge crash accountability. It pledged to further study the feasibility of the program, with a concluding report due in 2013.

“For all we know, this . . . could last months, could last years, and that’s part of the frustration and part of the noise level that’s going on in the industry,” said David Osiecki, senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs at American Trucking Associations.

But crash accountability was only part of the industry’s criticisms of CSA.

In a May membership meeting, ATA concluded that its members “said the unreliability of CSA scores, the loose or, at times, inverse connection to crash risk, as well as FMCSA’s unwillingness to frankly discuss the program’s weaknesses is very troubling and needs to be addressed.”

Multiple studies published in 2012 challenged the link between carriers’ scores in the Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories in CSA and the risk that a carrier will crash.

A series of studies by Wells Fargo Securities found no correlation between high scores in the Unsafe Driving and Fatigued Driving BASICs and crash risk, a finding that FMCSA quickly rebutted.

Then, an October study by the American Transportation Research Institute found a negative correlation between some BASICs and crash risk, meaning that carriers with worse scores in the Driver Fitness and Controlled Substances and Alcohol BASICs actually had lower crash risks than other carriers.

“It’s more than troubling to discover that the safer your score, as in the lower your score, the higher your crash rate,” said Dan Murray, vice president of research at ATRI.

The industry took its complaints to Capitol Hill in September, where lawmakers agreed that the program needed to make changes in some areas.

“It’s been just a little over two years since — prior to [CSA’s] implementation — we held a hearing in this subcommittee regarding this new system, and at that time we express a number of concerns that still endure,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (Ore.), the top Democrat on the House subcommittee on highways, said at the hearing.

In response to some feedback, FMCSA made what it called the largest changes yet to CSA, announcing earlier in September that it would add a new BASIC specifically to track violations of hazardous materials regulations, while doing away with the Cargo-Related BASIC.

FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro expected the alterations to only cause “modest” changes to carriers’ scores, but “enough to sharpen our focus on the carriers that need to have our focus.”

The changes took effect in December.

Some carriers had opposed the plan, telling the agency that it would further skew CSA scores and show bad scores for safe carriers.