Truckers urging Congress, FMCSA to hasten fix on CSA data

Trucking interests are asking Congress and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to make changes in the way the five-year-old Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program uses data collection involving truck accidents to rate fleets on their overall safety.
 
The American Trucking Associations (ATA) is asking FMCSA to make what it calls “common sense” changes to its safety measurement system by taking out data involving crashes that trucking companies and drivers did not cause—such as getting rear-ended when the truck was motionless.
  
“It is illogical, and a poor use of scarce enforcement resources, to label carriers as unsafe based on crashes they did not cause,” ATA said in comments filed with the agency
  
Currently, FMCSA insists uses all crashes against carriers, even ones the trucker was not at fault. This methodology skewers the data against truckers, ATA says.
  
“Merely being struck by another motorist does not make one more likely to strike others,” ATA said in its comments. ATA says 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 noted that FMCSA only has enough resources to audit 16,000 trucking companies (or 3 percent of all trucking companies) annually, the agency should identify and select those that cause crashes, not those struck by others. 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, ATA said.
    
“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,” ATA President and CEO Bill Graves said in a statement. “We have raised this issue and Congress has raised this issue. It is time for FMCSA to do what it knows is right make this common sense change.” 

Besides working the regulatory change, ATA also has been successful in lobbying Congress to force FMCSA to make changes. Already, there are bills introduced in the House to force those changes. And recently Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, indicated he soon would be introducing a similar bill in the Senate.

The House bill would force FMCSA to remove its carrier rankings from its web site and restructure the program. The Safer Trucks and Buses Act of 2015 is similar to a bill introduced last year by Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa. It was referred to the entire House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee on March 16.  
 
It would require FMCSA to use only “safety data determined to be predictive of motor carrier crashes,” with an emphasis on accuracy. This would require FMCSA to make changes in variations between state- and self-reported data and would require appropriate accounting for “geographical differences with respect to enforcement” and crash fault.
    
Truckers say until changes are made in the CSA carrier ranking system methodology, it works against motor carriers because shippers and third parties often make business decisions based on what the trucking lobby views as unreliable data collection to determine the CSA scores.
  
Meanwhile over in the Senate, Sen. Thune’s bill would focus on improving the accuracy of data, how faults are assigned in truck and bus accidents and other technical changes to the CSA program. Sen. Thune said he wanted more voluntary input in the system and would create incentives to encourage drivers to address safety defects voluntarily rather than risk monetary penalties.
  
Sen. Thune wants a similar change in the way FMCSA reviews truck accident data and assigns fault. Referring to a critical March 4 General Accountability Office report on FMCSA, Sen. Thune recently said CSA’s current methodology “does little to improve safety but has significant economic impacts.”
 
The issue has taken on new importance since FMCSA’s release in March of its QCMobile app, which grants easy access to CSA ratings. The agency is marketing the app as one that could be used by shippers, insurers, brokers, freight-forwarders and 3PLs to judge carriers’ safety records, which trucking interests call unfair.
 
Shortly after FMCSA released the CSA-based mobile app, a GAO official underscored her agency’s public stance against the CSA carrier rankings.
  
Interviewed by Mark Willis on the SiriusXM Road Dog Trucking News program, Susan Fleming, director of the GAO’s physical infrastructure department, said GAO would recommend removal of the CSA scores from the FMCSA web site. GAO recently concluded those rankings are flawed because of faulty data input.
  
Fleming told Willis in the March 18 interview that FMCSA’s continued push of CSA scores is giving her agency “a little bit of heartburn.” The app “is another way of publicly displaying information we don’t consider to be reliable,” Fleming told Willis.
  
“Taking a look at what the app doesn’t provide — It doesn’t provide frequency of violation and doesn’t even really explain what the scores mean,” Fleming said. She admitted that FMCSA doesn’t plan to implement the GAO recommendations, but added, “We’re not wavering from our work.”
    
Fleming said much the same thing during a Senate hearing in March. She testified that FMCSA has serious challenges in making its rating system fairer. She said there were wide variances based on geography because states perform roadside inspections in a variety of ways, with some states more vigilant than others. That skewers data depending on where certain trucking companies operate.