Study Confirms CSA’s Effectiveness at Identifying Crash-Prone Carriers, FMCSA Says
A new study commissioned by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration confirms that Compliance, Safety, Accountability program safety-measurement system data are more effective at identifying crash-prone motor carriers than the old SafeStat system, agency officials said Feb. 5.
“Results show that the companies the SMS would have identified for interventions, such as roadside inspections, warning letters and on-site investigations, had a future crash rate of more than double the national average,” the agency said in a statement.
The study was conducted by the Volpe Center, the Department of Transportation’s internal research agency. The results demonstrated that the carriers identified for a CSA intervention have a 79% higher future crash rate (4.82 crashes per 100 power units) than the group of carriers not identified for interventions (2.69 crashes per 100 power units).
The FMCSA study had more favorable results regarding the SMS data than a Government Accountability Office study released Feb. 3 that concluded CSA data face challenges because “most regulations used to calculate SMS scores are not violated often enough to strongly associate them with crash risk for individual carriers.”
GAO, a congressional investigative agency, also said “most carriers lack sufficient safety performance data to ensure that FMCSA can reliably compare them with other carriers.”
American Trucking Associations criticized the FMCSA report, calling it “overly rosy” and pointing to the GAO report’s findings as evidence of that.
“While we support the aims and objectives of CSA, it is important to accurately assess the program and its shortcomings in a balanced and honest fashion,” ATA President Bill Graves said in a statement. “Just because CSA is an improvement over previous programs does not make it a ‘good’ program for assessing the safety performance of individual carriers as the Government Accountability Office demonstrated earlier this week.”
