CVSA Wants CSA Scores Pulled From Public View
This story appears in the Dec. 1 print edition of Transport Topics.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance has sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx requesting the removal of carriers’ Compliance, Safety, Accountability scores from public view.
Stephen Keppler, CVSA’s executive director, said that while CSA has heightened industry safety awareness, its methodology has not been a good predictor of individual motor carrier crash risk.
He called the request to take down the Safety Measurement System scores from public view “a matter of tremendous importance to commercial motor vehicle law enforcement.”
“Since the collective crash rates of fleets with SMS scores above threshold are higher than those below, the SMS is useful as an enforcement prioritization tool,” the Nov. 14 letter said. “On the other hand, since the SMS scores are a poor indicator of an individual fleet’s propensity to be involved in a future crash, their utility in providing the public with information about fleets’ safety performance is limited.”
CVSA also said law enforcement should continue to have access to the scores and that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration should continue to improve the system.
“Until these improvements are made, however, CVSA echoes stakeholders’ call to remove SMS scores from public view,” the letter said.
Keppler was referring to a letter sent to Foxx in August and signed by 10 truck and bus trade organizations, including American Trucking Associations, calling for the scores to be withheld from public view.
The group cited a Government Accountability Office report in February that found significant statistical problems with SMS scoring.
The GAO report said that FMCSA faces two challenges in reliably assessing safety risk for the majority of carriers.
“First, for SMS to be effective in identifying carriers more likely to crash, the violations that FMCSA uses to calculate SMS scores should have a strong predictive relationship with crashes,” GAO said. “However, based on GAO’s analysis of available information, most regulations used to calculate SMS scores are not violated often enough to strongly associate them with crash risk for individual carriers.”
Second, GAO said, most carriers lack sufficient safety performance data to ensure that FMCSA can reliably compare them with other carriers.
An agency spokesman said Foxx will respond directly to the CVSA letter.
“That said, the Safety Measurement System has been a game changer in improving safety by making company violations and safety records publicly available to consumers, law enforcement and other businesses,” FMCSA’s Duane DeBruyne said.
“Our research shows that by focusing on the most at-risk carriers, we effectively remove the companies most often involved in crashes from the road. We continue to work with all partners to ensure an efficient, transparent system to provide safer transportation for everyone on the road,” DeBruyne added.
