Letters: CSA Scores, Number Play
These Letters to the Editor appear in the March 19 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
FMCSA: CSA Scores
The item in your Feb. 27 issue titled “CSA Scores Help Shippers Avoid Potential Lawsuits” fell regrettably short of your usual standards for objective, well-informed and fact-based reporting on the trucking industry.
The headline falsely suggests that reliance on CSA scores is universally accepted as the best tool for shippers’ to use in avoiding lawsuits over vicarious liability. Nothing could be further from the truth, as is evidenced by the author’s own roving-reporter pastiche of quotes from various observers interested in truck safety. While some extol CSA — especially if they are marketing CSA-based software to shippers and carriers — others quoted in the story make it clear that the best due-diligence techniques are to look at a carrier’s accident data, out-of-service violations and insurance history.
There is a huge difference between CSA methodology on one hand and accident data, out-of-service percentages and insurance records on the other. The latter are time-tested data sets recognized in FMCSA’s existing official regulations on motor carrier safety ratings.
By contrast, CSA and its “Safety Measurement System” (or SMS) are a newly concocted amalgam of “creative” mathematical formulas that never have been tested in the public rulemaking process required by the Administrative Procedure Act.
When FMCSA tells freight shippers and bus passengers that the so-called “BASIC” (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories) scores under SMS have equal validity with safety ratings as a means of assessing a carrier as high-risk, the agency is flouting federal law by treating CSA as a de facto regulation.
The article also appears to distort the publicly stated position of the Transportation Intermediaries Association by quoting Bob Voltmann as saying that CSA is “a tool that should be used” when shippers select carriers. While I know he is perfectly able to take care of himself, please note what his organization actually said on this subject in the Carrier Selection Framework it released not long ago:
“It has been, and remains, TIA’s consistent position that the FMCSA Safety Rating alone determines a motor carrier’s fitness for use and should always take precedence over, and clearly outweigh, any single score, or collection of scores, or data set, including CSA’s SMS or BASIC scores.”
As a matter of full disclosure, my law firm participated in a judicial challenge to the public release of SMS data on individual carriers in December 2010. As proud members of both American Trucking Associations and TIA, my colleagues and I know that both organizations have had robust internal debates over the merits of CSA and SMS. We also know that Transport Topics is capable of doing a much better job in covering this issue.
Mark Andrews
Partner
Strasburger & Price LLP
Washington, D.C.
Editor’s Note from Howard Abramson, Editorial Director, Transport Topics: While readers are clearly free to disagree with stories that appear in this newspaper, the headline in question accurately portrays the story, which says that CSA scores are one of the factors shippers use to determine carrier suitability. And Mr. Voltmann has confirmed the quotes attributed to him in the story, which basically say that shippers use CSA scores as one of the tools in selecting motor carriers. Rather than singing the praises of CSA — or condemning it — our role remains to be a primary information source helping all the stakeholders in the nation’s supply chain provide the best, most efficient service possible.
FMCSA: Number Play
During the town hall forum at the annual meeting of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies in November, the chief safety officer for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Jack Van Steenburg stated, “You know as well as I do, that you can make numbers say anything you want them to say.” Anybody who has dealt with statistical data knows that to be somewhat true.
There is a certain amount of scientific integrity that is expected when dealing with numbers that apply to public policy. When an agency uses selective data to justify its premises and opinions, its scientific integrity comes into question. Such is the case with FMCSA, as pointed out in the following three examples:
1. The use of “relative risk” statistics on hours of driving as related to crash risk, as a linchpin for hours of service and purported driver fatigue. Ironically, later studies hold that the first hour of driving produces more likelihood of a crash than any other hour. I will, however, exercise some statistical integrity by pointing out that this phenomenon is not remarkable or genuine because all driving shifts have a first hour, and very few have an 11th, 12th or 13th hour.
As a matter of fact, the new hours-of-service rule eliminates all continuous driving beyond the eighth hour with a mandated break. But the implication that the longer one drives into a shift the more likely he is to have a fatigue-related crash is statistically indefensible and is the disingenuous lie that much of the hours-of-service rationale is built upon. Finally, after NASTC’s decadelong questioning of FMCSA’s statistical honesty, American Trucking Associations joined us in pointing out FMCSA’s manipulation of data to exaggerate driver fatigue numbers.
2. The assertion by FMCSA, Public Citizen, Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways, Parents Against Tired Truckers, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, et al., that driver fatigue is a major crash causation factor in big truck/car accidents is totally indefensible statistically. All the studies I’ve seen have produced at best a 1.5% to 2% number. But through lawsuits, political pressure, emotional hyperbole and the use of statistical manipulation and dishonesty, FMCSA — through the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program’s Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories “fatigued driving” BASIC — advertises to the shipping public, insurance providers, special interest groups, Congress and the courts that 35% of our drivers are fatigued all of the time.
They use log violations as fatigue violations when more than 50% of these violations are form-and-function errors and not related to fatigue at all. Let us look at where the overemphasis on driver fatigue has gotten us:
• The overwhelming micromanagement and dehumanization of America’s truck drivers that calls for mandated electronic onboard recording devices (EOBRs).
• The 14-hour rule that exacerbates driver fatigue more than it helps combat it.
• The practical elimination of a short nap to restore alertness.
• The “nanny state” intrusion of driver qualifications that eliminate drivers who might be prospects for sleeping disorders.
3. In an effort to cost-justify its policies, FMCSA arbitrarily doubled the value of a life from an absurd $3 million to an even more absurd $6 million. So, our numbers that measure safety — fatalities, crashes and injuries — improved about 30% from 2007 through 2010 based on events per 100 million miles driven.
Actual fatality numbers went from 4,766 in 2006 to 3,675 in 2010. This fatality number in 2010 was an increase in fatalities over 2009, but the only genuine way to compare this increase to 2009 numbers is to calculate the number relative to miles driven, which increased that year. Yet, we get quotes about distress over an increase in our gross numbers in 2010 with no input on whether miles driven went up and how much our percentages changed per 100 million miles driven.
This is just another example of conveniently omitting or mis-stating data to put truck safety in a bad light.
David Owen
President
National Association of Small Trucking Companies
Gallatin, Tenn.
