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 carrier 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 wrote in its report, released Friday.
The 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.
CSA, which was implemented last December, 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.
“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.
ATRI also sought to measure how carriers were changing their practices based on CSA, such as hiring and adoption of technology.
The free report is available via ATRI’s website, www.atri-online.org.
