Common Sense Fix Sought To Remove Faulty CSA Data
“ATA identified the inclusion of all crashes, regardless of responsibility, as a serious shortcoming of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability system over five years ago,” the trucking group said in comments filed March 25. “It is illogical, and a poor use of scarce enforcement resources, to label carriers as unsafe based on crashes they did not cause.”
Currently, FMCSA insists on using all crashes against carriers, even incidents the commercial vehicle obviously did not cause. ATA cites as examples a March 20 fatal crash where a car carrying three off-duty New Jersey police officers driving the wrong way on a divided highway hit a truck. Again on March 20, a fatal crash in Texas involved a suspected drunk driver driving the wrong way on Interstate 27, where he hit a truck head on. A March 24 fatal crash in Washington, D.C. killed a passenger when a drunk driver stuck a parked tractor trailer.
“Merely being stuck by another motorist does not make one more likely to strike others,” ATA said, adding that the goal of CSA should be to identify the predictive value of crashes in the same way the agency does with violations. Crashes that a commercial motor vehicle driver did not cause are not indicative of the motor carrier’s propensity to cause a future crash.” ATA notes that since FMCSA has only enough resources to audit 16,000 trucking companies (3% of firms) annually, the agency must identify and select those that cause crashes, not those struck by others. The association further commented that FMCSA already removes such crashes from consideration when assigning a company’s official safety rating after an audit, but refuses to make a change to the publicly available CSA data intended to reflect safety performance.
“FMCSA’s failure to address this real flaw is especially egregious in light of its push to make CSA scores easier for the public to access and its encouragement that the public make decisions based on what they know to be faulty information,” said ATA president and CEO Bill Graves. “We have raised this issue, and Congress has raised this issue. It is time for FMCSA to do what it knows is right and make this common sense change.”
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