Updated:
1/5/2010 1:00:00 PM
CSA 2010 Test Results Raise Some Concerns
In Kansas, nearly 600 motor carriers received warning letters indicating that their safety performance was “unacceptable,” even though many of the companies have good safety and compliance records, said Thomas Whitaker, executive director of the Kansas Motor Carriers Association.
Although there is support for a performance-based safety rating program, Whitaker said CSA 2010 “creates a program based on penalties with little or no consideration of positive initiatives.”
In a Nov. 18 policy statement, KMCA’s board of directors insisted that FMCSA address five areas “immediately to provide fairness.”
KMCA said it wants documents other than violations to be excluded from the database being used to score safety; steps to assure that fleets aren’t penalized for crashes caused by passenger vehicle operations; use of vehicle miles traveled instead of power units to determine crash exposure; limited public release of safety information that could be misconstrued; and a revised system of weighting the severity of crash risk indicators.
John Hausladen, president of the Minnesota Trucking Association, said members have raised several “serious” issues based on recent test results. They include:
• Inconsistent enforcement from one state to another.
• Unreasonably severe weighting of some violations. Moving or changing residences from one state to another and not transferring a driver’s license has a severity weight of 6, for instance, and improper loading and cargo securement has 108 possible 10s (on a scale of 1 to 10), which puts flatbed carriers at greater risk than other carriers.
• Unfair enforcement burden. Motor carriers in test states face greater scrutiny than carriers in neighboring states.
• Insufficient access to information on drivers. FMCSA has flagged some drivers for violations but has yet to make the information available to carriers for use in hiring.
• Inadequate means to challenge violations. Carriers cannot easily remove violations when a court has overturned the infraction.
• Damage to carriers that are “wrongly rated.” Some carriers with good safety records and favorable SafeStat scores are being found deficient in the test program, which could lead to loss of business, higher insurance premiums and increased litigation unless data are “proven to work.”
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