Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/339485
COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | JULY 2014 45 T hree and a half years after Compliance Safety Accountability began its scrambling of how trucking safety is regulated and scored, carriers and owner-operators continue to suffer from its fallout, while bureaucrats struggle to repair the complex program. Among carriers receiving a ranking in any of the CSA BASICs (Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Cat- egories), none feel the program's inadequacies more than the smallest independents. As one respondent noted in a recent survey on CSA by CCJ's sister magazine Overdrive, the "small guys get looked at because a single incident shows up as a bigger percentage" with a more dramatic effect on rankings, and "not because we are unsafe." Unreliable small-fleet scoring was ranked the number one CSA problem in the survey. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration acknowledges CSA problems and strives for improvements. At the same time, the agency rigorously defends the system as is, with confidence in the CSA Safety Measurement System's numerical evaluation of carriers. "It is a good tool, and it is one of the factors that should be looked at" by all industry participants to measure carrier safety, says Bill Quade, FMCSA associate administrator for enforcement. But a grow- ing chorus of fleets, drivers, owner-operators and others call for scores to be removed from public view until the agency gets the kinks worked out. In Overdrive's poll, seven in 10 called for removal of the scores, and nearly half of that group also wants all in- spection and violation data to be removed. Such senti- ment reflects the reality that shippers and brokers treat the scores as gospel truth, refusing to do business with fleets that, in some cases, are just as safe as they were prior to CSA's activation. CSA scores: To be or not to be public It wasn't so long ago that suppression of CSA scores was an active debate. In February 2013, a majority of the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee's CSA Subcommittee came close to CSA's DISTORTED RANKINGS Small fleets and independents are most concerned about reliability of scores, but the system's many flaws haven't halted third-party use of the rankings in business decisions. Don't expect fixes anytime soon. BY TODD DILLS Should carriers' CSA SMS percentile rankings (scores) be removed from public view? Source: OverdriveOnline.com poll No 27% Yes 70% And also remove all inspection/ violation data from public view 32% And also remove only inspection/ violation data that has no proven relationship to crash risk 28% But keep all inspection/violation data publicly accessible 10% I don't know 3%