PHILADELPHIA — Data analysis vendor Vigillo is rolling out a crash-review service to aid carriers in their dealings with shippers, insurance companies and others when the fleet thinks it was judged unfairly.
Vigillo CEO and founder Steve Bryan said at an Oct. 20 press conference here that his Portland, Oregon, firm is hiring current and former truck safety inspectors to review highway accidents. The two-person panels will judge the accident as preventable or not, with a starting assumption that the crash was preventable.
Bryan, who has been mining CSA data even before the federal program started nearly five years ago, said the lack of crash reviews is one of the program’s most serious flaws. CSA was created by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to score trucking companies and their drivers based on violations found during safety inspections.
The CSA scoring system counts all crashes as violations, regardless of whether the accident was preventable.
Bryan was careful to draw a distinction between preventable or nonpreventable and fault or no fault.
“This is not a matter of fault. We’re not a court,” he said at the Management Conference & Exhibition of American Trucking Associations.
Vigillo cannot change CSA scoring, Bryan said, but the crash-review service, called Just, is not about allowing carriers to feel good about themselves.
The practical aspect is that shippers and carriers sometimes use CSA scores to penalize trucking companies, either declining to do business with them or raising premiums or canceling coverage. Bryan said a disinterested judgment that an accident was not preventable might persuade a company not to make a rash decision.
Bryan said the two-member panels do not include Vigillo employees, just the officers, and they must agree with each other. Bryan said the inspectors will use guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and ATA on how to define preventable.
As an example of a nonpreventable accident for which a carrier or driver should not be blamed, Bryan mentioned a legally parked truck that is plowed into by another vehicle.
