Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/71813
Irregular ratings Accident blame, violation weighting and regional differences continue to plague CSA. No fix appears to be on the horizon. BY JAMES JAILLET Inspections took on a new importance in December 2010, when the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program went into effect. still frustrates carriers, drivers and others with what they believe are serious flaws. Two issues that inspire most of the M groaning are the absence of crash accountability in the measurement system and the weight CSA gives certain violations over others. A third is regional disparities in enforcement that put some carriers at a disadvantage. The most immediate effort for change involves the highway funding bill, still pending at press time. Last month, members of the House and the Senate were deadlocked in a conference committee trying to flesh out a compromise version of a two- year funding bill. Some analysts say 26 OVERDRIVE JULY 2012 ore than a year after taking effect, the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program it's an opportunity for the industry to lobby Congress to pressure the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to change CSA. FMCSA officials declined to be interviewed, but through a prepared statement the agency said it "considered developing a crash weighting initiative that would examine the responsibility associated with crashes involving commercial" vehicles, but that it needed to study further in "several critical areas." The biggest problem is over crash accountability, says Tom Bray, editor of Transportation Management for J.J. Keller & Associates. "The argument is, 'We got hit by them. How come we're being held responsible for it?'" Regarding violation severity weighting disagreements, Bray cites examples such as relatively high values placed on not wearing a seatbelt and relatively low values assigned to brake problems. Steve Bryan, founder of Vigillo, a company that helps carriers manage their CSA scores, says he sees a push outside of the highway bill to pressure Congress. "Ultimately, some of this may get embodied in a highway bill," he says, "But I think there's a separate initiative to just go to Congress and lobby." The American Trucking Associations' stance, he says, "is it's time to take the gloves off a little bit and see what we can do to make this thing better." Bray, though, doubts that pressuring Congress to force FMCSA to change CSA will work. "FMCSA is already doing what Congress has Todd Dills