Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/391783
VOICES CHANNEL 19 8 | Overdrive | October 2014 Visit Senior Editor Todd Dills' CHANNEL 19 BLOG at OverdriveOnline.com/channel19 Write him at tdills@randallreilly.com. By late August, some trucking groups felt the time was right for a big change to the Compliance, Safe- ty, Accountability program. CSA display changes were in the bag. An interim administrator had taken the helm of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration following Anne Ferro's departure. The highly critical congressional Government Account- ability Offi ce report on CSA had been lodged in the offi cial dialogue over the program. The Alliance for Safe and Effi cient Truck Transportation's CSA lawsuit was dismissed. So a broad "CSA Coalition" of trucking organizations fi nally pulled their public trigger: They asked the U.S. Department of Transportation to pull the CSA Safety Measurement System category rankings from public view altogether. Their letter was fol- lowed shortly by another coalition of other trucking groups led in part by the ASECTT group, then a House bill that, if passed, would require FMCSA to revamp CSA to address problems of scoring reliability and data relationship to crash risk substantively. Reader comments on the coalition's letter contained a healthy dose of skepticism on the question of whether FMCSA will be responsive to the call for score removal. Reader Thomas Little may have paraphrased best the thoughts of many, commenting on Overdrive's Facebook page: With CSA, "FMCSA fully intended to let the industry do their policing for them. Spoon-feed the detailed data into the marketplace to drive consumer choice of motor carrier [and] insurance rates, and give the ambulance chasers one more tool in their arsenal. And then stand back and pretend that wasn't how CSA was supposed to be used. "I like what the trade orgs are trying to do, but they won't be able to unring that bell." On the House bill, former own- er-operator Joe Rajkovacz, currently of the California Construction Truck- ing Association and a signatory to the ASECTT letter, said there was "zero chance this will ever get through a Democratically controlled Senate. I'd eat my hat if that happened, but I feel safe in that bet today." Read more about the issue, and tell us what you think, via the Aug. 27 and Sept. 23 posts to the Channel 19 blog. California truck enforcement always ranks high for inspection intensity. It falls behind only Maryland and Pennsylvania in our current analysis (available in full via OverdriveOnline. com/csa). Say what you will about the Cal- ifornia Highway Patrol's aggressive approach, but consider this: More than 55 percent of California's inspections were totally clean, viola- tion-free, making CHP statistically one of truckers' best friends across the nation for improving CSA scores. Only Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota and North Carolina show higher percentages of clean inspec- tions among the contiguous states. Which brings me to the latest little bit of California law enforcement news. The photo of the California park ranger was picked up on the Lost Coast Outpost blog and then at the San Francisco Chronicle's website, subsequently going viral. The man who took the picture, after trying unsuccessfully to wake the ranger – note the Keystone Light in his lap – reported the offi cer to, you guessed it, CHP, which subsequently picked him up. (As of early September, he was on "administrative leave," according to reports.) I'm inclined to give CHP a high- fi ve on this one. Trying to 'un-ring' the CSA alarm Find links to the Lost Coast Outpost's original piece on this California state park ranger and his arrest at the Sept. 3 Channel 19 post. Share of respondents to Overdrive who describe FMCSA's display changes to the CSA Safety Measurement System's carrier profiles as little more than "lipstick on a pig," with bedrock problems outweighing positive benefits. CHP: Truckers' best friend? OWNER-OPERATORS' VERDICT ON CSA SMS DISPLAY CHANGES A MASTERFUL FACELIFT 4% OTHER/NOT SURE 5% OverdriveOnline.com poll NEUTRAL 7% 84%: WORTHLESS 16%: OTHER