Data drives CSA safety ratings

Nearly a decade since its launch, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has continued to refine the Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) program that monitors all registered motor carriers in the United States. While originally developed to predict accidents involving large trucks and passenger buses, the new focus is on prevention and creating a safety culture in the commercial vehicle industry.

The pending changes to CSA are the biggest since its 2010 launch. This would be driven by new types of data, such as turnover, compensation and cargo.

Service One Transportation, a Wisconsin-based trucking and logistics company operating with more than 50 drivers, uses its CSA scores as a foundation for its driving program to promote a safety culture in its fleet. The company holds quarterly safety meetings designed to instill and strengthen best driving practices, behaviors and decision making. 

New drivers for Service One are initiated through the fleet’s driving program, “which prepares them to apply personal and professional ethics and safety standards in the decisions they make behind the wheel and around the truck,” according to Mike Myszewski, vice president of operations and logistics for Service One. Then all drivers and employees attend the regular safety meetings that feature talks and videos on safe driving techniques along with a review of the fleet’s current CSA scores in FMCSA’s Safety Management System (SMS).

“These inherent values—protecting life, truth, trust, and integrity—take precedence even over our business priorities,” Myszewski said. “For example, while on-time delivery is a priority at Service One, our drivers understand they have a responsibility and our full support to take any precautions needed to safely transport in extreme weather conditions, whether that means driving below posted speeds or parking the rig until it’s safe to continue.”

Myszewski said the program and company safety culture led to national recognition for Service One, including silver, gold and platinum awards in fleet safety, highway safety, and workplace safety from the Great West Casualty Company.

Shifting CSA concerns

Over the past decade, concerns about CSA have shifted, according to the American Transportation Research Institute’s (ATRI’s) Critical Issues in the Trucking Industry annual report, which was last published in 2019. Since it first appeared on ATRI’s list of top industry concerns in 2010, CSA saw its lowest ranking in 2019, falling to No. 8. It was No. 6 from 2016-2018 and had been a mainstay in the Top 5 industry concerns for much of the first half of the 2010s. 

In the most recent survey, 16.1% of respondents listed CSA as one of the top three concerns, ranking it just behind electronic logging devices and just ahead of transportation infrastructure. 

In August, FMCSA announced plans to make its Crash Preventability Determination Program permanent. That program would allow carriers to remove non-preventable crashes from their CSA Unsafe Driving BASIC—Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category—score calculation. According to ATRI, however, the industry is still waiting on more information to fully understand how the CSA program will change, including how motor carrier performance will be rated, using the Item Response Theory (IRT).

The IRT model would replace the current SMS model that Service One and hundreds of other fleets currently use to calculate CSA scores. FMCSA is in the process of revamping it to comply with a mandate under the last decade’s Congressional FAST Act. The National Academy of Sciences proposed using the IRT  in 2017 as a more data-driven model to evaluate a motor carrier’s safety. FMCSA officials are testing this system but are not expected to decide if they will adopt the IRT until September 2020, according to an audit by the U.S. Dept. of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General.

CSA Reform

Steve Bryan, executive vice president and general manager of SambaSafety Transportation, said there are three big defects with the current CSA program—involving data quality and sufficiency—that need to be addressed: 

• Crash preventability: There is no determination if a crash was preventable or not as all crashes count against a fleet’s  CSA scores.

• Safety event groups: Carriers are placed into safety event groups based on size. These safety event peer groupings are flawed, Bryan said.

• Disparate enforcement: There are 50 different law enforcement agencies contracted to enforce these regulations. CSA does not make adjustments for the various intensity of enforcement across the country. 

With IRT, the current SMS-weighted scoring system would be replaced with more complex formulas. FMCSA would make it so only preventable crashes count against CSA scores. Safety event groups would be replaced by a safety exposure index. Enforcement levels will be considered so carriers that operate in high enforcement areas won’t necessarily be rated below riskier carriers that operate in a less strict enforcement area. 

Drug clearinghouse

The latest enhancement to the CSA program was the launch of the long-awaited Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, which is increasing the minimum annual rate for random drug tests of truck drivers from 25% to 50% in 2020. 

The Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse is a central database of all positive test results, including test refusals. This closes a “loophole in the system” where drivers who failed a drug or alcohol test—or avoided one—could find employment with another fleet without that carrier knowing about the failed or avoided test, according to Dave Osiecki, president of Scopelitis Transportation and Consulting.

Congress mandated the clearinghouse as part of the MAP-21 highway funding law. The rule, finalized in 2016 by FMCSA, estimates it will eliminate nearly 900 crashes a year involving large trucks. Motor carriers will need to check the database as part of the hiring process in addition to querying each employed driver annually. All commercial drivers seeking employment with a carrier will also have to register.