The American Trucking Associations continues to urge the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to make “common sense changes” to its Compliance, Safety, Accountability scoring system by removing crashes not caused by trucking companies or their drivers.
The FMCSA currently includes all types crashes in its CSA scoring, factoring in accidents not caused by a commercial vehicle. The ATA continues to point out examples where trucks are assigned scores for being involved in a crash, regardless of fault, including an incident last month where a car carrying three people was driving the wrong way on a highway veered into the path of a truck and hit it.
As reported by Heavy Duty Trucking, ATA believes that the goal of the CSA should be to identify whether an accident is an indicator of future of other likely crashes. “Being struck by another motorist does not make one more likely to strike others,” the ATA stated.
The FMCSA currently removes such crashes from consideration when assigning a company’s official safety rating after an audit, but does not make the change to the publicly available CSA data. The ATA wants the FMCSA to use its limited auditing resources to identify and select the accidents only where a company or driver was at fault to use in the CSA score.
“FMCSA’s failure to address this real flaw is especially egregious in light of its push to make CSA scores easier for the public to access,” said Bill Graves, ATA president and CEO. “We have raised this issue and Congress has raised this issue. It is time for FMCSA to do what it knows is right make this common sense change.”
