Following a National Academies of Science review of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) safety monitoring system, officials within the American Trucking Association (ATA) said the study’s results substantiated many of the concerns the organization had about the CSA program.
ATA’s concerns centered on the inclusion of certain types of violations within the program, including the impact of geographic enforcement disparities on carrier’s scores and that the use of clean inspections was critical to the accuracy of the program.
ATA Director of Safety Policy Sean Garney said the organization strongly agreed with the National Academies’ conclusion that the CSA program should be based less on the “subject matter of expertise” of enforcement and more on the empirically-validated data.
ATA saw great potential in the Academies’ recommendation that FMCSA should overhaul the current CSA methodology in favor of a new, more adaptive, data-centric model with the potential to address serious flaws in the system, he said.
“To maximize CSA’s potential, there is an urgent need to address issues regarding data sufficiency and accuracy – specifically when looking at crash and carrier exposure data,” Garney said. “Until more study and correction of these issues is complete, ATA strongly believes FMCSA should continue to keep CSA scores out of the public domain.”