CSA Revisions Improve Most Scores but Worsen Others, Carrier Execs Say
This story appears in the Aug. 23 print edition of Transport Topics.
Changes that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has made to its CSA safety-monitoring program are causing the ratings of fleets across the country to change, and not always for the better, carrier executives told Transport Topics.
Carriers by and large saw their scores go down, sometimes dramatically, but in some of the BASICs most related to higher crash rates, some fleets saw their scores go up in other areas, as a result of FMCSA’s changes to the program. In this program, lower scores mean better safety ratings.
“We saw significant drops in some of our scores and saw increases in others, and it is strictly in tune with the methodology changes that were implemented,” said Jack Curry, safety director for American Central Transport Inc., Liberty, Mo.
Curry said the truckload carrier “saw significant improvement in the BASIC area of unsafe driving and in our crash indicator . . . 55 basic points in one and 30 in another; it is a huge drop,” which he attributed to FMCSA’s use of miles driven and total vehicles for grouping fleets, rather than just the number of trucks.
On the flip side, he said that American Central Transport’s percentile score in the cargo-related BASIC rose because of the changes FMCSA made to the types of violations it examines in that category.
FMCSA started allowing nationwide fleets to see their percentile scores under CSA on Aug. 16, but fleets in nine states, such as Missouri, where the agency had been running a pilot test of the program, have been able to see their scores all along.
In addition to opening up the system to provide more information, FMCSA also made a number of changes to how it calculates fleet safety records — ranging from resetting the thresholds for when a company is targeted for intervention to the severity of hundreds of violations to how the system calculates a carrier’s exposure to safety problems (8-16, p. 3).
“Had these tweaks been done previously, we probably wouldn’t have been on their radar,” said Donna Underwood, safety director for Steelman Transportation Inc., Springfield, Mo.
Underwood said Steelman, primarily a flatbed carrier with 100 trucks and a small hazardous materials division, was deficient in four of the BASICs before the changes were made.
“I am right now deficient in just two: cargo and fatigued driving,” she said.
Steelman had been deficient in unsafe driving because of speeding violations, but FMCSA instituted a graduated point system, Underwood said, which reduced its score.
Sherwin Fast, president of Great Plains Trucking Inc., Salina, Kan., said the modifications caused dramatic drops in the score for his fleet of about 55 trucks.
The company initially was in the 95th percentile for crashes, Fast said, but after an FMCSA investigation put the fault for many of those crashes elsewhere, “they lowered it down to 75.”
“Now, this last couple weeks when they switched to the mileage instead of the vehicle, we’re at a 20.7,” he said. “We run a lot of miles, so we went from a 95 to a 20. . . . We would never have been targeted for an intervention of any kind, had they been doing this all along.”
Great Plains’ unsafe driving score also fell dramatically, to 43.8 from 93.9, because of the change in methodology.
“I love the new one; it just looks so much better,” Fast said.
“They’ve improved across the board,” said Richard Jenkins, safety director for Brown Trucking Co., Lithonia Ga., adding that the company’s crash indicator score “dropped 30 basis points, which was huge.”
