FMCSA Outlines Plans to Study Safety Scores, Based on Truck-Involved Crash Responsibility

This story appears in the July 30 print edition of Transport Topics.

Four months after delaying a planned rollout of a system that would assign safety scores for truck crashes based on a carrier’s responsibility, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it will spend the next year studying how it could implement such a program and whether it would be worth the $3 million it could cost annually.

FMCSA said in a plan published on July 23 the research will focus on whether police reports of truck-involved crashes can be used to determine who is at fault, what benefits such determinations could have on judging carriers’ overall safety and how the agency could manage the process.

Anne Ferro, FMCSA’s administrator, discussed the plan last week at a meeting of state trucking association leaders in Utah.

The research into police reports “will attempt to determine whether they provide sufficient, consistent and reliable information that can be used to determine the carrier’s role in a given crash,” Ferro told attendees at the Trucking Association Executives Council’s summer meeting — one of three meetings the group holds annually — according to her prepared remarks obtained by Transport Topics.

The agency also will study whether giving different violation scores in the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program based on crash fault would improve highway safety.

“FMCSA will conduct analysis to determine if the carrier’s role in a given crash is a better indicator of future crash risk,” Ferro said in her prepared remarks. Research has shown that being involved in a crash means a carrier is at a higher risk of having another crash, FMCSA said in its report.

FMCSA will complete the research next summer and will then seek public input after releasing the results.

In its planned research, the agency wants to figure out whether being at fault in such a crash makes the carrier more risky than not being at fault.

“The expected benefits are a better predictive quality of future crashes and more efficient management of limited resources to target motor carriers for intervention,” the agency wrote.

In March, FMCSA decided to delay a planned crash accountability system rollout after complaints that the system should not rely on police reports (3-19, p. 1).

American Trucking Associations and other industry groups blasted FMCSA for the delay. ATA appreciated last week’s news, but spokesman Sean McNally said FMCSA could still do more. “We appreciate FMCSA re­sponding to ATA’s request to disclose a time line for a crash accountability process,” McNally said.

While FMCSA conducts the research, it should start assigning lower weights to crashes for which a carrier is obviously not at fault, McNally added.

“These types of crashes are well known and well understood by all those involved,” he said.

A 2010 study the agency re-leased July 23 showed that police reports are likely a reliable source for determining crash fault. When workers were given the same police reports and the same instructions for determining accountability, they came to the same conclusion 93.2% of the time, the study found.

That reliability “seems very good,” the researchers said, but improvements to the coding instructions could improve the outcome.

Ferro called that study a “first step” toward examining whether police reports could be used, but she noted that “more needs to be done.”

One issue was that the research did not determine whether crash weighting would be worth the cost.

“It was unclear whether being able to determine the carrier’s role in crashes would lead to improvements in [the safety measurement system] that would be significant enough to justify the anticipated $2 million to $3 million annually required to analyze up to 100,000 crash reports every year,” Ferro said in her remarks.

FMCSA’s research aims to examine the central objection raised by Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, who took credit for stopping FMCSA from rolling out the system before: whether input from others, such as crash victims, should be considered alongside police reports and carrier statements (5-14, p. 1).