A recently published white paper by the American Trucking Association shines a light on some issues with the FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) system and calls in to question the validity of using the system to make real-world decisions about how reliable specific carriers are.
According to the ATA, the CSA system produces an “imperfect and unreliable measure of a carrier’s safety record,” and that some researchers have found “virtually no correlation between scores and crash rates in any of the measurement categories.”
Despite their misgivings about the accuracy of the results, the ATA still supports the idea of the CSA program, but says that there is simply too little data to give an accurate portrayal of any carrier. According to the whitepaper, too much weight is placed on a single incident when not enough time has passed to reveal any sort of trend in safety.
“Crashes are relatively rare events so it’s possible that a low crash rate is more an artifact of the carrier’s limited exposure (i.e. low mileage or operates in rural area) than the fact that it has a robust safety program. Conversely, a high crash rate may reflect that a carrier with low mileage was unfortunate enough to be involved in a crash (that it did not necessarily cause), resulting in a spike in its rate. This is more likely the case for small carriers that have limited exposure.”
There’s also the issue the FMCSA has only enough data to assess 200,000 (40%) of the estimated 525,000 active motor carriers in “at least one BASIC [category].” But in order to be assigned a score, a carrier must have had at least three relevant inspections and negative data. So of those 525,000 carriers, only 18% have been assigned a BASIC score in even one of the 5 categories.
This lack of data is a massive issue since scores are based on a carrier’s performance relative to other carriers of similar size. As the white paper puts it, “a moderately safe company may score poorly compared to those on whom the agency has data – but not if it were to be compared against all other similarly situated carriers.”
You can read the white paper here.
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Source: fleetowner, trucking
” Unreliable and inaccurate “. Are they really just figuring this out? FMCSA should be run by elected officials and meet twice a year. Appointees have to make up rules to justify their jobs. 99% of the rules being made have nothing to do with safety. Follow the money, that’s what it’s all about. EOBR’S , apnea testing, certified dot doctors, all of it is making someone richer at the expense of the people that are really the backbone of the industry.