Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/324702
24 | Overdrive | June 2014 CSA'S DISTORTED RANKINGS BASIC over the intervention 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 program 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 customers told me they checked every month to see if they could use us again, and they called as soon as we lost the trian- gle," 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 rank- ing approach. Among the worst, he says, is the scores' public nature. In Panther's small Safety Event Group of compari- son (with just 73 of the larg- est straight-truck carriers), the percentile-ranking basis of scores in the Unsafe Driving BASIC "dooms approximately 25 carri- ers 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 carri- er'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 determining a carrier's rating. Given the agency's small staff relative 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 rat- ing element of FMCSA's safety program, using ratings of Satisfactory, Conditional and Unsatisfactory. The CSA SMS runs alongside it, giving more of a real-time window into inspections, violations and crashes. However, the difference in results produced by each system is marked. In some quarters, eliminating that discon- nect is seen as at least a partial solution to public confusion over what the scores mean. It's a key component of why critics feel use of the scores in business deci- sions is so onerous. The discrepancies are likely to remain until a Safety Fitness Determina- tion rulemaking is proposed and completed, which will take years. Slated for pro- posal late this year, accord- ing to recent estimates, the SFD would use roadside inspection violation and crash data to rate carriers with enough data in the system; the grading would not be on a curve and would replace the current Safestat rating model. This would give entities such as brokers, shippers and insurance companies a more hard-and-fast indication of a carrier's safety performance. Given SMS reliability problems at the small-carrier level, however, respondents to Overdrive's CSA Survey showed only a 20 percent approval for the notion of using inspections and crashes toward establishing the SFD. Have you or one of your trucks been involved in a crash in the last two years? Yes: 16% | No: 84% A fatality crash 2% A tow-away crash 10% An injury crash 4% No 84% Source: Overdrive's 2014 CSA Survey. Respondents were instructed to default to the most serious crash if more than one crash had occurred. CRASH FAULT/ACCOUNTABILITY. FMCSA's long-awaited crash weighting study could be delivered as early as this month, says Bill Quade, the agency's associate adminis- trator for enforcement. The study will address whether FMCSA will be able to account for crash fault in carrier CSA Safety Measurement System results. CSA's failure to do so has been criticized from the beginning because carrier Crash Indicator BASIC scores suffer whenever a truck is in a wreck, even when the truck driver had no fault. Though only 16 percent of respon- dents to Overdrive's 2014 CSA Survey indicated involvement in a crash over the last two years, the issue of the lack of fault accounting is No. 4 on the list of CSA problems. CSA_0614.indd 24 6/3/14 10:27 AM