Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/856429
Voices channel 19 6 | Overdrive | August 2017 Visit Senior Editor Todd Dills' CHANNEL 19 BLOG at OverdriveOnline.com/channel19 Write him at tdills@randallreilly.com. The long-awaited congressionally mandated National Academy of Sciences analysis of the Compli- ance, Safety, Accountability Safety Measurement System and its scores recommended a raft of changes. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration could choose to act upon them to improve the system and move safety rating further down the road it's been traveling, with more reliance on roadside data to issue more ratings and do fewer audits. We should know if this is their plan within a couple of months, given the FAST Act's process for returning the scores to public view: a corrective ac- tion plan reported back to Congress. But Vigillo's Steve Bryan, long an actor in the realm of CSA improve- ment, says the agency only needs to go through that process if it "insists on bringing the scores public again. If they throw up their hands and say we're fine with them being private, they don't have to do anything." In that case, Bryan says, the CSA SMS is little more than a "half-baked solution sitting in the dark." The Alliance for Safe, Efficient and Competitive Truck Transportation sees a third way forward, emphasiz- ing less reliance on roadside data. It proposes what ASECTT principal Tom Sanderson describes as a biennial (every two years) offsite "desktop" au- dit to determine fitness to operate, akin to what occurs during the new entrant audit, for every carrier in the nation. Such a system might help standardize safety ratings. It also could result in more of them being issued. The Satisfactory rating is today's "safe-to-use" certification for carriers in FMCSA's rating regime, particularly now with CSA scores hidden from public view. Changing the output of the audit system to Fit/Unfit (getting rid of the Conditional rating) and using a full compliance review to issue any adverse rating could make for a "fresh approach," Sanderson believes. "The agency's been messing around with [CSA scores] for 14 years. And they're really no closer to having a valid certification, having the FMCSA determine a thumbs- up or thumbs-down on whether the carrier's safe," he says. Explore these issues in more depth via the June 24 and July 6 posts on the Channel 19 blog. A 'third way' toward a fair safety rating 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000 10,000 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 Satisfactory Conditional Number of Satisfactory, Conditional safety ratings issued Safety ratings continue to trend negative, nonratable. As I wrote in 2014, with an early ver- sion of this chart first, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration "has shifted away from the traditional compliance review to greater reliance on more focused reviews and away from a safety-rating approach." Principal accountability for determining carrier compliance, many argued, effectively had been offloaded by FMCSA onto shippers, brokers and insurers via their interpretation of the safety signposts in publicly available CSA scores. The number of safety rat- ings issued by the agency fell off precipitously. When ratings were issued, furthermore, they were more likely to be negative. Today, the number of Satisfactory reviews remains less than a third of the total issued in 2010. And in 2013, 2015 and 2016, Conditional ratings exceeded the number of Satisfactory ratings. Now that's a coil! When the coils get big, you don't chain them to the trail- er. You chain the trailer to the coil. Notice the bow in the side rail near the chains! — Connecticut-based owner-operator Joe Bielucki, who hauls with this flatbed and a 2005 Kenworth T800 daycab in the multistate regions around his home. Catch more from the KW's late spring cleaning in the June 17 post on the blog.