Editorial: Let’s See the Study

There’s been a lot of energy expended recently as the trucking industry pushes to get the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to adopt a reasonable crash accountability standard.

As part of that effort, American Trucking Associations last week urged FMCSA to release the results of a study it commissioned that is likely to support the industry’s push to use police reports as a major tool in the agency’s determination of who is at fault in truck-related accidents.

FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro stated in a 2010 letter to ATA that the preliminary results of the study into the value of police reports were “promising,” and she pledged to publicly release the study in a short time.

Well, it’s now 2012, and we’re all still waiting, both for FMCSA to release the report and for Ferro to unveil the agency’s plan for determining crash causation as she had promised would occur months ago.

On June 4, ATA cited the 2010 correspondence from Ferro in which she reported that preliminary study results “indicate that the use of police accident reports is a viable option for determining large truck and bus crash accountability.”

When a Transport Topics reporter caught up with Ferro after the ATA statement, she said only that she was “looking forward to sharing the analysis of our crash-weighting study,” but she declined additional comment. Her spokeswoman also declined to elaborate.

Trucking is very interested in this issue because, under FMCSA’s new safety regime, crashes have a major effect on a carrier’s overall ranking. Under current policies, several fleets have complained that they have been seriously harmed by crashes for which its drivers had no blame, such as when a motorist rams into a legally parked truck.

Administrator Ferro apparently was ready to issue the agency’s standard earlier this year but backed off when some interest groups complained that they hadn’t had sufficient input into the agency’s decision-making process.

We don’t object to the agency’s listening to all interested parties before it issues its crash accountability standard. But it’s not OK for the process to be hijacked by interest groups.

It’s clearly time for FMCSA to release its crash accountability standards and for it to release the supporting material it used in coming to those standards.