The trucking industry won an admission from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) over its concerns about the Compliance, Safety & Accountability (CSA) scores penalizing motor carriers for crashes which were not their fault.
The admission was made by FMCSA’s Chief Safety Officer Jack Van Steenburg, who participated this week in a point-counterpoint discussion on industry regulations at the Commercial Carrier Journal’s (CCJ) Spring Symposium. The spring symposium was held on May 18 – 20, 2015 in Birmingham Alabama.
When discussing the CSA scoring program with leaders from the trucking industry: “It’s not fair to the industry. I’ll come out and say it,” Van Steenburg said “We recognize we have to do something for the industry.”
Van Steenburg also went on to acknowledge that the likelihood of FMCSA incorporating some type of crash accountability or crash weighting in the expansive regulatory program was unlikely. He went further and indicated if the FMCSA developed formula to weight crashes for fault, it likely would only be for those that were “really obvious ones.”
FMCSA itself indicated earlier this year in a study on the issue, that assigning crash fault weighting to CSA scores would be difficult. It cited a lack uniformity from state to state in accident reporting.
The CSA program was launched in 2010 and has been a constant source of friction between motor carriers and the FMCSA.