This Editorial appears in the Oct. 22 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today. We’re thankful that the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Transportation has agreed to audit the federal government’s new Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.
Getting a professional, independent opinion on some key aspects of CSA will be good for trucking and for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which created CSA and is responsible for implementing it.
Our thanks goes to Reps. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) and Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) for formally asking the IG to look into CSA. The request comes in the wake of a hearing held last month by the House Transportation Subcommittee on Highways and Transit. Duncan is chairman of the subcommittee; DeFazio is the ranking Democrat.
As we’ve said many times before, American Trucking Associations strongly supports the goals and intentions of CSA. But we have some important questions and reservations about various details of CSA and the way FMCSA is implementing it.
In a letter to the DOT IG, the congressmen wrote that witnesses at a hearing last month “raised concerns that a lack of adequate safety data, inappropriate weighting of violations and other scoring problems are causing CSA to erroneously label carrier safety performance.”
Of critical importance to us all, the IG has already agreed to specifically examine the relationship between carrier safety scores as measured by CSA and crash risks, as determined by other data.
Serious concerns have been raised by ATA and others over the seeming lack of correlation between scores FMCSA is assigning to various fleets based on CSA and the known safety performance of those fleets.
We all agree that CSA is designed to get the bad actors fixed or off the road.
It is not designed to create a new set of arbitrary and inefficient hurdles for well-run and well-operated fleets to jump over.
While it’s unclear how quickly DOT’s IG will move in this audit, subcommittee officials urged that the report be completed by August.
In the end, it will be best for everyone involved to prove the efficacy of the standards FMCSA is seeking to implement under CSA, to make sure that we don’t have unintended consequences that not only don’t cure the problems that exist, but exacerbate them.
We look forward to assisting the IG during this audit, and we expect a better CSA in the end.
