Crash-Fault Study Finishes; FMCSA Reviewing Results
This story appears in the Sept. 9 print edition of Transport Topics.
A long-awaited study of how the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration could assign fault for truck crashes has been completed, but the study is being reviewed in-house by the agency, FMCSA confirmed last week.
“The analysis is complete, and the report is undergoing internal and peer review,” FMCSA spokeswoman Marissa Padilla said last week. “Once complete, the agency will set a date for public release.”
Dave Osiecki, senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs for American Trucking Associations, suggested the internal screening is a sign the agency is determining how to implement the findings.
“That’s an indicator to me that those results point them in a particular direction, and that the direction is favorable to our position,” Osiecki said.
ATA supports the use of police accident reports as a favored method of determining fault in truck-involved crashes.
One of the primary objectives of the agency’s research has centered on whether police accident reports are a “sufficient, consistent and reliable source of information” on which to base a weighted crash system.
The study, jointly conducted with the Department of Transportation’s National Transportation Systems Center, also is attempting to assess whether a carrier’s role in an accident is a stronger predictor of future crash risk than crash involvement alone.
Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for ATA, said motor carriers are eager for FMCSA to complete its study and implement a process for determining crash accountability for two reasons.
“First, the current process of including all crashes, including those the carrier did not cause, erroneously suggests that carrier is unsafe,” Abbott told Transport Topics. “Second, failing to have such a process in place prevents FMCSA from distinguishing fleets that cause crashes from those that are merely involved in them, through no fault of their own.”
ATA and many carriers have been critical of the current FMCSA system that lists crashes in a carrier’s public safety measurement profile, but does not indicate whether the carrier was at fault.
A carrier’s percentile score in the Crash BASIC category, which uses state-reported crashes to track a carrier’s crash involvement, remains private.
However, FMCSA said it does not include a determination of a motor carrier’s role in the crash to compute Crash BASIC percentile scores.
ATA has argued that without a determination of fault, shippers and brokers looking to hire carriers who check FMCSA records can mistakenly assume a carrier is unsafe, even if the crashes were not the carrier’s fault.
FMCSA said its research shows that once a carrier is involved in a crash, it is more likely to be involved in a future crash, despite who was at fault.
Last year, FMCSA appeared to be about to announce a weighting system based largely on police accident reports. But after meeting in private with safety interest groups, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro scrapped the plan, saying the issue needed further study.
