Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/324702
PULSE June 2014 | Overdrive | 7 By Max Heine Editorial director mheine@randallreilly.com T he Federal Motor Carrier Safety Ad- ministration says it never intended for CSA scores to become a standard rating tool used throughout the industry. Certainly the agency never expected it to cause the blacklisting of decent companies. Yet this is exactly what's happened. The feds should have known better when they conceived Compliance, Safety, Account- ability. Given the litigious potential of highway accidents and the modern infatuation with data, why wouldn't a carrier safety scoring system immediately become a normal part of business? It appears that FMCSA was presumptuous in the levels of accuracy and fairness it expected from CSA. As investigations by Overdrive and others have shown, the depth of the problems mirrors the complexity of the program. In the poll that underlies our cover story this month, readers rank reliability as CSA's top problem. For example: Otherwise clean "pre- screen" inspections too often don't get finished and entered into the system by law enforcement. On the other hand, a new clean inspection can push a carrier into a new peer group, thereby rendering the previously safe carrier as unsafe. Furthermore, since a score can be based on just five inspections over two years, a single violation can have an outsized effect. Many have been calling for carriers' percen- tile rankings from the Safety Measurement Sys- tem to be made private. In Overdrive's poll, that was supported by 70 percent of readers. Nearly half of that group would like to see inspection and violation data removed, too. That's no surprise. Because of the way the system is structured, in most cases the scoring reliability problems affect small independents more than larger carriers. Steps toward privacy would be an improve- ment, at least for now. Private scores probably would drive some shippers to require that carriers reveal their rankings if they want to do business, as Todd Spencer of the Owner-Opera- tor Independent Drivers Association points out. Since no real fix of CSA scores' reliability is imminent, perhaps there is a way for FMCSA to keep ques- tionable data secret, even from prying shippers and insurers. It might seem too simplistic, too much a waste of data, to move toward a safety profile that's little more than knowing whether a carrier has been placed out of service or not. At the other extreme, to what extent is it the public's right to know every single fleet safety measure- ment when many numbers are seriously skewed, taken out of context or outdated? Clearly the "A" in CSA isn't working when the data being accounted for paint a distorted picture. The result is a system where too many carriers, espe- cially struggling independents, are assumed guilty until proven innocent. Safety trap Reaction mixed on obama bill's pay pRoposal Scan the QR BELOW with your smartphone to join a lively conversation on detention and other on-duty not-driving time pay. It's tied to a May story about other driver-compensation reform provisions in the Obama admin- istration's draft of a multiyear highway bill, released April 29. Here are some comments on a provision that would mandate carriers to pay company drivers detention pay of at least the federal minimum wage: Gary Gilbert: 80-hour weeks. 38-hour pay. Detention pay is overdue. Huck northcutt: Make it the shippers and receivers. Not the carriers. Ric Hylton: Make shippers/ receivers pay. ... Detention will magically disappear. bruce Kallenbach: I believe it will help, but make sure these big shippers and receivers don't throw more stupid rules in front of truckers. dennis olson: Please no! I can't afford any more govern- ment help! ... Some customers don't pay – I just never go back and haul for them! If you can't afford to not haul for a bad customer, you should look at your business model! Company drivers, go work someplace that pays their drivers. William mcKelvie: So what is the great law going to do – drop the current rate to minimum wage? Would not surprise me, not one bit. When a clean inspection can hurt an independent's rating, something's wrong with the math. Todd Dills Voices_0614.indd 7 6/3/14 11:05 AM