Geographic bias, questionable data affect reliability of safety ratings, ATA tells FMCSA

ATA was strongly opposed to the Jan. 21, 2016, notice and request for comment titled “Carrier Safety Fitness Determination (SFD) ” as it relied heavily on Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) and Safety Measurement System (SMS) data in assessing the safety performance and crash risk of individual fleets.

“While we recognize the agency is requesting information on all data systems that may be used in an SFD, several concerns raised in response to the 2016 proposal remain,” ATA said.

For an SFD to be an accurate representation of a motor carrier's fitness to operate, ATA said determinations must be based on a consistent and uniform data source.

“Unfortunately, data sufficiency concerns remain a serious limitation,” ATA said.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has previously raised concerns about data sufficiency as part of the CSA/SMS methodology. FMCSA responded by establishing a minimum threshold of 11 inspections with violations for a fleet to be assessed in the CSA/SMS program.

While this scenario was specific to CSA/SMS methodology, ATA said the same concerns can be applied to SFDs, including, other data limitations that were raised in the same GAO report.

“In addition, if these same safety performance data are going to be used to determine whether a carrier is fit to operate, FMCSA needs to consider and address all identified data limitations, or these determinations will also be at risk,” the GAO report stated.

One such limitation is the enforcement disparity or geographic variation of enforcement procedures, ATA said. “It is unquestionable that motor carrier enforcement officials in some jurisdictions place a disproportionate emphasis on certain regulations and cite carriers and drivers at far higher rates,” ATA said.

One example cited by ATA of geographic bias was in 2022, when approximately 84% of all violations issued in Texas were vehicle maintenance violations. During the same period, 34% of all violations issued in Indiana were vehicle maintenance violations.

“While we acknowledge that certain violations may vary based on geographic location, vehicle maintenance violations should be assessed consistently regardless of where the vehicle is operated,” ATA said.

In this example, a motor carrier who operates predominantly in Texas is “much more likely” to receive a vehicle maintenance violation and therefore be targeted for greater scrutiny during an investigation, ATA said.

“If these two carriers were in the same safety event grouping in CSA/SMS, the carrier from Indiana may enjoy a much better vehicle maintenance safety category score not because their vehicles are in better working order, but because they operate in a state that does not prioritize vehicle maintenance violations,” ATA said.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) said in its comments that FMCSA’s current SFD process reaches only a small percentage of motor carriers. In fiscal year 2019, FMCSA and its state partners conducted 11,671 compliance reviews out of a population of more than 567,000 active interstate motor carriers.

“These factors contribute to an unreliable system that does not produce uniform or objective safety fitness determinations,” OOIDA told the agency. As FMCSA pursues the development of a new methodology to determine when a motor carrier is unfit to operate, the agency must avoid relying on the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) and Safety Measurement System (SMS) programs, OOIDA said.

“Since their inception in 2010, CSA/SMS have completely failed in their objective to reduce injuries, fatalities, and crashes,” OOIDA said. “This will not change until CSA/SMS incentivizes actual safety performance instead of regulatory compliance.”

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), representing the law enforcement community, said it does not support FMCSA retaining the current three-tiered rating system of Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory and Conditional.

“The current system can be misleading and should be simplified for clarity,” CVSA said.

CVSA reiterated its support for the proposed move to a single rating of ‘Unfit,’ for motor carriers. A single determination of ‘Unfit’ will help remove uncertainty and clarify the intent of the program – to identify and remove unsafe motor carriers from the roadways, CVSA said in its comments.

The current three-tiered rating system relies solely on compliance review data. Because the enforcement community does not have the resources to conduct compliance reviews on the majority of the industry on a regular basis, CVSA said these assessments “can often be outdated and inaccurate.”

Use of the term ‘Satisfactory’ can be misleading, as it can be viewed as an endorsement of the motor carrier by FMCSA, CVSA said

“A ‘Satisfactory’ rating reflects the status of the motor carrier at the time of the investigation,” CVSA said. “Some current safety ratings are quite dated and may no longer accurately reflect a motor carrier’s safety performance.”

Likewise, CVSA said, use of the ‘Conditional’ rating is misleading, as it allows motor carriers to continue operations for an extended period of time despite having significant breakdowns in their safety management controls.

“Allowing motor carriers to continue operations under a ‘Conditional’ rating also provides little incentive to the motor carrier to address their safety management issues,” CVSA said.

The National Association of Small Trucking Companies (NASTC), Gallatin, Tenn., said the current system today is “very poor.”

“A new direction is worth considering, as long as the new course is simpler, clearer, fairer and faithfully (and) consistently executed by regulators,” NASTC said.

At present, NASTC told FMCSA that carriers subjected to lengthy reviews and found in compliance are left unrated and not identified as “satisfactory.”

NASTC said an immediate step that would partially mitigate the consequences of the situation of inspected carriers left unrated would be to change “Unrated” to “Licensed to Operate.”

Truckers complain that Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) scores are unfair. CSA has erroneously branded objectively safe carriers as unsafe. This has cost carriers business because brokers and the shipping public have presumed that CSA scores reflect reality or that the official misbranding of a safe carrier as unsafe is enough to cause them vicarious liability concerns.

“Plaintiffs’ lawyers routinely use CSA scores as ‘evidence’ against carriers both in court and in settlement demands,” NASTC told the federal government.