A new working committee of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance has been inaugurated to tackle the issue of lack of uniform crash data for truck-involved crashes and the issue of crash accountability within the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, according to Scott Hernandez, recently retired from the Colorado State Patrol and current CVSA director of crash standards and analysis.
As reported by CCJ magazine, the Crash Data and Investigative Standards Committee’s ultimate goal is to work toward uniform reporting and investigative practice in order to “basically establish a standard protocol and reporting system” for crashes, to “help everyone with better data – to do better investigations, and to be more consistent” in all facets of crash investigation and reporting.
Hernandez notes new committee chair Thomas Fitzgerald, a CVSA member and truck-and-bus-focused lieutenant out of Massachusetts, has driven some of the conversation around the establishment of the committee, noting CVSA “needs to step up and take a lead on this issue,” Hernandez says. “This is something that we should strive to do, but we have to start with the basics. … We’ll start with the training [among state jurisdictions on crashes] being consistent.”
The CVSA website has been recently updated to reflect the stated mission of the new committee, outlining these goals:
- Establish and maintain a uniform commercial motor vehicle/large vehicle crash reporting protocol.
- Establish and maintain a uniform commercial motor vehicle/large vehicle crash investigation protocol.
- Report authorized crash information/data in a uniform manner that allows for stakeholder analysis.
- Establish and maintain uniform commercial motor vehicle/large vehicle crash training for stakeholders.
- Work cooperatively with all stakeholders to reduce commercial motor vehicle crashes.
- Establish accredited training curriculum.