Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/127433
OverdriveOnline.com/CSA THE FAULT HANDICAP. FMCSA appears to be a long way from accounting for crash fault in the CSA SMS. In the meantime, carriers and drivers can do best by understanding the system and what's at risk. WHAT DETERMINES A "HIGH RISK" CARRIER? Doing everything in your power to avoid falling into FMCSA's high-risk definition could be more important as the agency aggressively pursues such carriers. FMCSA DEFENDS CSA'S EFFECTIVENESS. Hear in a video what the agency has to say about its own analysis of how well CSA identifies higher-crash-risk carriers. HOW TO GET A DATA REVIEW. The DataQs system for challenging information collected about you has limited applicability to crashes, but knowing how to make a successful review request is important, given the frequency of inspector error. VIOLATIONS YOU SHOULDN'T OWN. Postcrash inspection violations that resulted from the accident aren't supposed to appear in SMS results, but sometimes they do. Here's how to protect yourself. CRASH INTENSITY BY STATE. An interactive map on the website shows at a glance the top 10 states for truck-involved accidents, accidents with injuries and fatal accidents. You also can download lists that show those rates for the 48 contiguous states, including total fatalities, injuries and towaway-only crashes by state. CSA'S DATA TRAIL PARTS 1 AND 2. The full archive shows stories, interactive maps and downloadable lists from Part 1, "Screening out drivers," and Part 2, "Inconsistent enforcement." That's somewhat ironic, because many observers see the CSA system working best in the largest size groupings, given that larger carriers are most likely to have enough inspection and crash data to receive rankings in the system. Yet, among the largest carriers, there is no difference between the crash rates of carriers with one or more CSA alerts and the entire group of for-hire carriers of that size. This would imply that many large fleets without an alert have an accident risk at least as great as those with one or more alerts. 1.7 Crash rate 1.5 ■■■ ALL FOR-HIRE CARRIERS ■■■ CARRIERS WITH AT LEAST ■■■ ONE CSA BASIC ALERT 1.3 1.1 0.9 0.7 1 2-5 6-15 16-50 Carrier size in total power units Fatality rate per 100 million miles... ■■ All for-hire carriers ■ ■■ carriers with at least one ■ ■■ CSA BASIC alert ■ 1 2.7 3.2 4.1 2-5 5.9 4.7 5.4 6-15 16-50 51-500 501+ 3 3.3 3.3 3.8 3.1 3.2 51-500 501+ Injury rate per 10 million miles... ■■■ All for-hire carriers ■■■ carriers with at least one ■■■ CSA BASIC alert Carriers' number of trucks Online extras If the Safety Measurement System were identifying carriers with a greater crash risk properly, you would expect to see a much greater crash rate for carriers with CSA alerts. That's not always the case, based on Overdrive's analysis of CSA data gathered by RigDig Business Intelligence. While carriers with percentile rankings above the alert threshold in one or more of the SMS BASICs do have higher DOT-recordable crash rates when compared with the entire population of for-hire carriers, the difference is smaller with larger carriers. Crashes per million miles traveled DATA TRAIL Are large, accident-prone fleets dodging alert status? Carriers' number of trucks CSA's Inconsistent warnings 1 2-5 6-15 16-50 51-500 501+ 3.7 5.9 6.2 8.9 6.4 7.5 4.7 4.6 5.1 5.9 5.2 5.6 As with accident rates in general, rates of fatalities and injuries for carriers with CSA alerts often are only marginally different from those of the entire for-hire population. Such is particularly the case among mid- and large-sized carriers, among which the CSA SMS works most equitably, ranking the vast majority of them. 38 | Overdrive | May 2013 CSA_Crash_accountability.indd 38 5/1/13 11:37 AM