FMCSA Tries to Ease Industry’s Fears of CSA With Seminar at Mid-America Trucking Show

This story appears in the April 1 print edition of Transport Topics.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — An official with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration came to the Mid-America Trucking Show to help disprove what he called common myths about the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.

Bryan Price, a senior specialist in the CSA program, said the program has spawned false rumors among fleets and truck drivers alike.

“There’s a perception that if I go to work at XYZ Trucking and XYZ Trucking hires me that they automatically inherit my violations,” Price said at a March 21 session.

But a carrier’s CSA record reflects the violations recorded only for that company, Price said. Carriers do not inherit any driver’s violations.

“We get that question a lot from drivers, because I think sometimes companies tell the drivers, ‘I can’t hire you, because you’ve got all these violations, and they will go on my record,’ ” Price said.

He said FMCSA has heard questions about its policy to give the same violation score for all crashes, regardless of fault or preventability.

Crash reports the agency receives do not include any indication of fault, and FMCSA does not try to make a determination itself, Price said.

“It’s understood that there’s a lot of interest in making this system overall better by determining preventability,” he said.

FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro told reporters the next day that the agency is on track to complete a study into a possible crash accountability system in July.

“The agency has been pretty darn clear and transparent on its approach in examining whether a crash preventability component can be a part of CSA,” Ferro said. “We recognize that there are some questions about how uniform police accident reporting is; how uniform a resource on preventability and nonpreventability of those accident reports are; and, if you have that as a source, how do you also provide input opportunity for both the entity that may have struck and the individual that’s been struck?”

Those questions, as well as analysis of the costs and benefits of such a system, are central to FMCSA’s research, Ferro said.

Price was optimistic about the forthcoming research.

“Intuitively, we think it’s going to make our system better if we can get to that, but what we’re looking at is the feasibility of the system,” he said.