An alliance of trucking industry groups has urged Anthony Foxx, Department of Transportation Secretary, to remove publicly visible safety ratings from the CSA Web site.
Based on a February report from the Government Accountability Office, groups including the American Trucking Associations and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association have expressed their desire for the change. The GAO report charges that the standards used in the CSA’s Safety Management System to rank motor carriers are flawed and lead to inaccurate results.
Small carriers (including single owner-operators) are particularly at risk for a high score in SMS once they have been inspected enough times to rate a score in the first place. Specific criticisms involve data quality, frequency of violations, and the perceived discrimination against small carriers.
Data quality
Much of the data provided for SMS scores are inconsistent between states due to differing practices. In addition, two scores – the Unsafe Driving BASIC and Crash Indicator – rely on carrier-provided data which may compromise the validity of the resulting score.
“Data sufficiency”
According to GAO, the FMCSA’s minimum number of inspections for issuing a carrier a score is too low and unfairly targets small carriers by artificially driving them above the threshold for intervention.
Violations measured
Of 750 regulations included in SMS scoring, 593 had less than a one percent violation rate. Only 13 had a regular correlation to crash risk.
Also, while SMS scores can accurately point out carriers with a higher group crash rate, it is unable to account for the minority of individual drivers at those carriers that actually were in crashes.
To back up their findings, GAO tested a different scoring method that ultimately identified more individual carriers that fell above the intervention threshold based on FMCSA’s own designations.
The industry groups that co-signed the letter to Secretary Foxx have called for greater accuracy in transparency in FMCSA’s scoring of high-risk carriers. However, FMCSA spokesperson Marissa Padilla argues that a solution such as the one presented by GAO is “unrealistic” for their current budget.
In the meantime, carriers must be diligent in their efforts to maintain high standards of safety – and hope that they have a number of positive inspections.
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