FMCSA to Examine Severity Weightings of CSA Violations at Roadside Inspections

This story appears in the July 4 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has asked its advisory committee to examine concerns about roadside violation severity weightings in the agency’s new safety program and to help develop wireless Internet-based electronic logging device technologies.

At a meeting in late June, FMCSA officials asked members of the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee to make sure that the points the agency assigns to dozens of violations under the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program are weighted fairly so they are an accurate predictor of a carrier’s crash risk.

Specifically, FMCSA asked the committee to determine if the individual roadside violations are in the correct violation grouping, and to rank each violation group in the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs, in priority of crash risk.

The committee is expected to report back to FMCSA by the end of August, said David Parker, senior legal counsel for Great West Casualty Company and the committee’s chairman.

Although the industry has generally been supportive, some have been critical of the CSA program because they believe not all of the violations are related to a carrier’s risk of crash or safety performance.

Bryan Price, an FMCSA senior transportation specialist, told MCSAC members that the agency wants the advisory committee to “refine” the CSA’s controversial Carrier Safety Measurement System and help the agency gain trucking industry support for the system that went into operation in December (12-20 & 27, p. 5).

“We’re not asking you to reinvent the wheel,” Price told the committee during a June 21 meeting.

The seven BASICs are unsafe driving, fatigued driving, driver fitness, controlled substances and alcohol, vehicle maintenance, cargo-related and crash history.

The new safety measurement system incorporates all safety-related violations recorded in roadside inspections. The prior rating system, SafeStat, only counted out-of-service and select traffic enforcement violations from roadside inspections.

The severity ratings, from one to 10 points for each violation, with 10 being the highest, were developed by the agency based on a sophisticated “statistical regression” computer analysis and expert review of the violations of 250,000 drivers from 2005 to 2007, Price said.

The resulting measurement system has been an attempt by the agency to rank the bad behaviors that lead to increased crash risk.

The CSA database maintains a carrier’s history for two years and a driver’s history for three years.

“We’re not looking for a guy that has a bad day,” Price said. “We’re looking at patterns of behavior.”

But during a public comment session, Jeannie Gordon, vice president of compliance for Landstar Transportation Logistics, asked that the committee review crash data as they relate to all seven BASICs.

“Carriers with very low crash frequency can, and do, have BASICs over the threshold,” Gordon told the committee. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Consider that even if a carrier has a low crash rate, customers are looking at other BASICs. Carriers can go for a year without an inspection and still have BASICs above the threshold.”

Beth Thomas, a senior attorney for regulatory affairs for FedEx Ground, said the package carrier has concerns over violations not safety- related, such as failure to pay child support or state taxes being listed on a driver’s record.

“These result in driver’s license suspensions for administrative reasons that has nothing to do with the safety performance of a driver.” 

Thomas asked that the committee and FMCSA consider decreasing or eliminating severity weights for such  violations not safety-related.

The committee also was asked to help the agency define the structure that will transmit hours-of-service data from a handheld wireless electronic logging device via the Internet to a law enforcement officer’s laptop.

Michael Huntley, chief of FMCSA’s vehicle and roadside operations, told the committee that, after meeting with carriers, law enforcement officers and EOBR suppliers, the agency established that a wireless device would be a “viable option” for many carriers.

The agency also wants comment  from the committee on issues related to the transmission of the data through telemetric application services, USB connections and the 802.11 wireless local area network.

Randy Mullett, vice president of government relations and public affairs for Con-way Inc., told the committee he was concerned that an Internet-based system would be costly for carriers that have invested tens of millions of dollars in Global Positioning System-based EOBRs, rendering those devices “essentially useless.”

The agency is rushing to ensure that EOBR suppliers can provide compliant devices by June 1, 2012, when the agency plans to publish its final EOBR rule. Nearly all interstate carriers would have three years from the effective date to comply with the rule, which is designed to enforce hours-of-service compliance.

Parker said the committee plans to come up with the technical specifications by Aug. 29. He said the committee will hold public meetings on July 11-12 in Alexandria, Va., and a second meeting on Aug. 1-2 at a yet-to-be determined location.

“There’s a lot to be done,” Parker said.