CSA Changes Increase Focus on Cargo, Driver Fitness

This story appears in the Aug. 16 print edition of Transport Topics.

The changes the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is making to its CSA safety-monitoring system will lead to increased enforcement in the two areas that correlate least with future crash risk, an examination of the revisions has found.

The same examination, conducted by Vigillo LLC, one of two companies endorsed by American Trucking Associations to provide CSA tracking services, found that the revisions to CSA’s safety measurement system decrease the amount of enforcement leveled at fleets with poor crash histories and high numbers of unsafe driving violations, two strong predictors of future crashes.

The changes won’t be formally announced until Aug. 16, but they are spelled out in documents obtained by Transport Topics and include modifying severity weights for dozens of violations and adding or removing violations from the system.

FMCSA also will change the thresholds for initiating enforcement against unsafe carriers, lowering the bar for enforcement in the unsafe driving and fatigued driving BASICs, as well as the crash indicator, and raising it for the cargo securement, driver fitness, vehicle maintenance and substance abuse categories.

As a result, Drew Anderson, director of sales for Vigillo, Portland, Ore., told TT, there should be an increase in enforcement interventions in the cargo securement and driver fitness BASICs, two areas that studies have shown not to correlate to crashes (7-19, p. 1; click here for story).

“Cargo remains almost the same as a percentage of total interventions: It went from 14% to 15%, so that was nominal,” Anderson said, “and driver fitness upticked a little bit, but only from 6% of the total interventions to 9%, so not dramatic.”

Under CSA, the agency will use the scores the system generates to initiate a series of interventions ranging from warning letters to full on-site audits of carriers.

FMCSA said earlier this month that it intended to account for the lack of correlation by downplaying the two BASICs in question (8-9, p. 1; click here for story).

Anderson said that, in addition to increased enforcement for cargo securement and driver fitness BASICs, the total number of interventions for unsafe driving and past crashes — two of the groups with the strongest correlation to crashes — declines under the revised system.

“Unsafe driving fell from 30% of the interventions down to 15%,” Anderson said. “The crash [indicator] fell from 22% down to 16% of the interventions.”

Fatigued driving, he said, was one area that had a significant increase in interventions, jumping to 31% from 15% of the total under the new model.

Vigillo’s sample, Anderson said, included 1,800 carriers and about 600,000 drivers.

A spokeswoman for FMCSA said the agency had no comment about the changes, or Vigillo’s findings, saying only that the agency would provide more information about the program when it opens the CSA system for fleets to see their rankings on Aug. 16.

Those changes include raising the threshold for the agency to start enforcement in the cargo securement and driver fitness BASICs, along with drug and alcohol violations and vehicle maintenance. The thresholds for all four categories previously had pushed up to the 80th percentile, meaning that the top 20% of carriers in terms of violations would be subject to enforcement actions.

For BASICs that more closely align with crashes — unsafe driving, fatigued driving and previous crash history — the threshold dropped to the 65th percentile from the 72nd.

Besides changing the enforcement thresholds, FMCSA also adjusted the relative severity of dozens of violations — mostly in the cargo securement and driver fitness BASICs — and removed some violations, mostly because of paperwork issues, from consideration by the CSA system.

The changes, FMCSA said, result from recommendations to the agency from “subject matter experts.”

“It is important to note that, while many carriers will view these changes as positive,” said Rob Abbott, ATA vice president of safety policy, “the full impact of these changes is not yet fully known, and we will likely find that it will have a disproportionate impact on some carriers, and that is something we must constantly strive to address.”

Abbott added that removing a number of paperwork violations is “an acknowledgment [by FMCSA] that these violations aren’t necessarily tied to crash risk.”

FMCSA also removed size-and-weight violations from the cargo securement BASIC but warned that “roadside inspectors will continue to cite these violations at the roadside, and safety investigators will continue to address these violations, including potential enforcement actions, if appropriate, through investigations.”