ATRI Survey of Truckers Says CSA Tops SafeStat

Most trucking companies believe the federal government’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program is an improvement over the SafeStat system it replaced, the American Transportation Research Institute said.

ATRI’s survey of carriers’ perspectives of CSA found that carriers with higher safety violation levels generally had a more negative view of the program and that carriers understood the important aspects of it, the organization said.

“Encouragingly, FMCSA’s outreach efforts leading up to CSA and in its first year of deployment seem to have been successful, as carriers were generally knowledgeable concerning specific details of the program,” ATRI stated, referring to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

The Nov. 18 report shows a lot of positives in terms of carriers’ knowledge and opinions of the program, said Boyd Stephenson, manager of safety and security operations at American Trucking Associations.

“Motor carriers, they really do see that this program aligns their behavior to stronger safety. The majority feel that it is improving safety,” Stephenson told Transport Topics.

“The numbers on the basic understanding of the program were really good in the report,” he said. “And I think that shows that both FMCSA and ATA have done a very good job of educating the motor carrier pool on CSA and what it means for the industry.”

CSA, which was implemented in December 2010, gathers inspection and violation data about motor carriers, then assigns weights to them and gives scores to the carriers and drivers based on their compliance with safety regulations.

ATRI, a non-profit research arm of ATA, also sought to measure how carriers were changing their practices based on CSA, such as hiring and adoption of technology.

“Since CSA began, more than half of the motor carriers surveyed indicated that they have elevated or otherwise altered their hiring standards,” the report said. Of the carriers surveyed, 70% reported using FMCSA’s pre-employment screening program to learn about potential drivers’ safety records before hiring them.

“There’s a lot more scrutiny on a driver’s record,” Stephenson said. “You’re not necessarily going to see carriers firing drivers for poor CSA scores, but there’s an understanding that it’s going to be a lot more difficult to hire drivers in the future.”

CSA has not yet had a major negative effect on trucking’s pool of drivers, but carriers are starting to see difficulty in finding qualified drivers, the report said.

That could be bad for carriers soon, Stephenson said.

“I think that this greater scrutiny on hiring drivers, it may have some effect on the driver shortage issue,” he said.

The report is available for free, and can be requested through ATRI’s website, www.atri-online.org.