Trucking association calls FMCSA statements on CSA ‘misleading’

Arlington, VA – The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is providing “misleading” statements about the strengths of its Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, the American Trucking Associations stated in a white paper (.pdf file) released Oct. 16.

In the white paper, ATA claims that many measures in the CSA program suffer from “insufficient data” and cannot adequately detect carriers with future crash risk. The white paper states that although FMCSA claims 200,000 carriers have sufficient data to be scored in CSA, the data is adequate to assess those carriers in only one of CSA's seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories.

Only about 12 percent of all active carriers can adequately be assigned a percentile ranking in the system for at least one category, indicating a lack of data – especially for small carriers – ATA states.

Additionally, ATA said a recent study from its research arm, the American Transportation Research Institute, concluded that carriers without sufficient scoring data cannot be considered “safer” than carriers with more reported data.