Will FMCSA’s proposal to alter the way it scores carriers — and, ultimately, puts them out of service — suffer from the same crash-risk disconnect as the current Compliance, Safety, Accountability Safety Measurement System?
A report published this week indicates it will, at least based on the carriers the agency said would have been deemed “Unfit” to operate when applying the new Safety Fitness Determination formula to a sect of carriers in 2011.
The Safety Fitness Determination rule — and the CSA system at large — are boring, technical subjects. But their impact on the industry and owner-operators’ livelihood shouldn’t be diminished, as Overdrive Senior Editor Todd Dills noted in a similar piece on the SFD rule this week.
Numbers obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request made by the Alliance for Safe, Efficient and Competitive Truck Transportation show that more than half (56 percent) of the carriers FMCSA said would have been deemed “Unfit” in 2011 under the inspection-based portions of the Safety Fitness Determination rule — and who remained in business for at least the next year — recorded zero crashes in that 12-month time span.
Perhaps even more concerning for owner-operators and small carriers, ASECTT’s Freedom of Information Act-obtained numbers show that 76 percent of carriers with five or fewer trucks, and who had been flagged Unfit to operate, recorded no crashes in the 12 months succeeding.
ASECTT obtained the data from FMCSA on May 4, according to a roughly 60-page comment filed by a coalition of carrier groups, including ASECTT, during the Safety Fitness Determination rule’s public comment period.
The numbers — and the questions they present about the proposed rule’s methodology — add to the mounting pressure the agency’s faced since publishing the proposed rule in January. The rule’s heavy use of data from the Compliance, Safety, Accountability Safety Measurement System’s BASICs violates both federal law and common sense, trucking industry groups have argued. Legislation has also been presented in the U.S. House to block the agency from continuing to work on the rule, pending an overhaul of the CSA program.
