Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/339485
46 COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | JULY 2014 C O V E R S T O R Y : C S A ' S D I S T O R T E D R A N K I N G S officially urging the agency to withhold percentile rankings in the BASICs from public view in the CSA SMS. Removing scores from public view, however, was not an option on the table when the CSA subcommittee met this past April. Removing the scores might not even be feasible as long as the program exists, said subcommittee member Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. That's because there's a "cat's-out-of-the-bag" effect in third-party reliance on the scores. If the scores were available only to law enforcement and carriers themselves, Spencer said, some shippers then likely would require disclosure as part of carrier contracts. Another potential consequence would be a piling on of further workload for an already taxed federal agency with a flood of Freedom of Information Act requests for carrier SMS BASIC scores, said MCSAC member John Lannen of the Truck Safety Coalition of public safety advocates. Tom Sanderson, chief executive officer of broker/3PL Transplace, told the CSA Subcommittee that "several large shippers have told us that even one BASIC over the interven- tion threshold knocks a carrier out of their service." Cream of the Crop Transportation's Hours of Service BASIC score went beyond the intervention threshold a couple of years ago, and owner J. Webb Kline says the small fleet lost as much as $1.5 million in annual sales. It was "a glaring example of just what an economic disaster this pro- gram is for companies like ours that fall through the cracks of the system," Kline says. After Cream of the Crop went more than a year without an hours violation, his small fleet no longer showed any percentile ranking or score whatsoever in that BASIC, so the FMCSA warning triangle disappeared. "Many of our old custom- ers told me they checked every month to see if they could use us again, and they called as soon as we lost the triangle," Kline says. "Our sales shot up from an average of $4,000 a week per truck to well over $5,000, and often exceeding $6,000 per week per truck." It's not just small carriers that take issue with the public nature of SMS scores. Irwin Shires of all-owner-operator Panther Expedited Services says he's "fought very hard" to expose fundamental flaws in CSA's percentile ranking approach. Among the worst, he says, is the scores' public nature. In Panther's small Safety Event Group of comparison (with just 73 of the largest straight-truck carriers), the percentile-ranking basis of scores in the Unsafe Driving BASIC "dooms approximately 25 carriers to never being able to improve their score to a point to where their golden triangle goes away," Shires says. That's because in all of the BASIC categories, the system grades on a curve, so that the weakest carriers, no matter how safe they are, fall prey to those who score better. "It's like a scarlet letter that brokers and shippers are using in determining whether to put their freight on a carrier's truck," Shires says. SMS, safety rating system disconnect compounds problems CSA was intended as an improvement to FMCSA's SafeStat rating system that used primarily out-of-service violations uncovered during onsite company investigations in deter- mining a carrier's rating. Given the agency's small staff rela- tive to the size of the motor carrier population, the system was limited in the number of carriers it could rate, as well as its ability to update those ratings. Today, SafeStat remains the official rating element of FMCSA's safety program, using ratings of Satisfactory, Con- ditional and Unsatisfactory. The CSA SMS runs alongside it, giving more of a real-time window into inspections, viola- tions and crashes. However, the difference in results produced by each system Unreliable small-fleet scoring was ranked the number one CSA problem in the survey. Todd Dills