Life on the road

CSA 2010: 'accountability' tops list of concerns

A handful of trucking industry leaders – testifying at a June 23 hearing on the Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 held by the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit – agreed that the initiative has merit but expressed concerns over the potential negative impact of CSA 2010 on certain constituents, notably carriers and drivers.
     The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) recently completed a two-and-a-half-year, nine-state field test of the program aimed at raising safety standards through increased scrutiny of drivers and by holding carriers more accountable for their unsafe drivers.
     Commenting on the field test, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said, “Preliminary findings show that we achieved a 35 percent increase in investigations using this approach. We reached more carriers and did so with greater efficiency. And we have anecdotal evidence of carriers that changed their business practices as the result of a CSA 2010 contact and improved their safety, further confirming the old adage, ‘what gets measured gets done.’ ”
     Testifying on behalf of the American Trucking Associations (ATA), Keith Klein, executive vice president and COO of Transport Corporation of America, said the ATA fully supports CSA 2010’s objectives of targeting unsafe operators, changing their behavior and removing the most egregious actors from the road. He also said that the ATA has concerns with the current design of CSA 2010 and how these “flaws” will affect the industry and highway safety if not corrected.
     “The intent of raising these concerns is two-fold,” Klein said. “The first is a matter of safety, to ensure that unsafe carriers are selected for interventions, and the second is a matter of equity, to ensure that relatively safe carriers are not selected for interventions.”
     Klein outlined the following ATA recommendations to address its concerns:
• Make crash accountability or “causation” determinations on truck-involved crashes before entering them into a carrier’s record so drivers and carriers are held accountable only for crashes they cause.
• Use vehicle miles traveled (VMT), not number of trucks or power units, as a carrier’s exposure measure.
• Focus on using only actual citations for moving violations and not unadjudicated “warnings” issued by law enforcement.
     Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), had a different take on the accountability issue. Motor carriers who have routinely let drivers shoulder the complete burden for regulatory compliance will find life very different under the CSA 2010 enforcement regime, Spencer told the Congressional committee.
     Spencer stressed the impact the program should have on motor carrier accountability. “It’s a matter of holding the appropriate people accountable,” Spencer said. He highlighted the problems at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach as an example of motor carriers shirking responsibility. “Those problems existed whether they were safety, mechanical or environmental, because the carriers that operated those trucks were not held responsible,” he said. “Hopefully, this CSA 2010 program will bring the accountability that’s sorely needed.”