Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
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LEADING NEWS, TRUCKING MARKET CONDITIONS AND INDUSTRY ANALYSIS T wo days after GAO's report, FMCSA countered with its own CSA study that it said found the oppo- site: The SMS scoring system identifies carriers with the greatest crash risk. Though FMCSA's study wasn't a rebuttal to GAO's report, one of its key conclusions signaled SMS scores and their intervention thresholds identify carriers with crash rates 79 percent higher than those not identified for agency intervention. The agency said it calculated that number by simulat - ing results for carriers based on its own data and then cross-checking that with actual crash involvement. FMCSA measured its findings based on crashes per 100 power units, and the 43,000 carriers it identified as above an intervention threshold per SMS scores were involved in 51,763 crashes, yielding a crash rate of 4.82 per 100 power units. Those carriers not identified as above the thresh - old – just more than 235,000 – were involved in 54,222 crashes, yielding a crash rate of 2.69 per 100 power units. The agency also backed up criticism of CSA's so-called bias against smaller carriers, pointing to their higher rate of crashes as the reason they're seen as "picked on" rather than a flaw in the system that unfairly singles them out. The crash rate of carriers with fewer than five power units, which make up 75 percent of the companies reg - istered with DOT, have a crash rate of 3.84 per 100 power units, compared to 3.51 for carriers with more than 50 power units and 2.98 for carriers with more than 500. – Kevin Jones CSA scoring faulty, unfair for small carriers, GAO report says T he scoring system used by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in its Compliance Safety Accountability system is flawed and involves an incom- plete data set, a Government Accountability Office report concluded last month. GAO also found the program par- ticularly is unfair for small carriers. The GAO report, "Modifying the Compliance, Safety, Accountability Program Would Improve the Ability to Identify High Risk Carriers," also recom- mends FMCSA change the system due to various shortcomings found in the study, most of which stem from the quality of the data used by the agency to score carriers. Industry trade groups like the Owner- Operator Independent Drivers Association and the American Trucking Associations – often loud critics of the agency's carrier scoring program – both expressed agree- ment with the study's findings. The report, while seemingly a proponent of CSA's mission of scoring carriers as an attempt to target unsafe ones, identifies sev- eral key problems with the initiative and its Safety Measurement System scores. These problems "raise questions about whether SMS is effectively identifying carriers at highest risk for crashing in the future," says GAO's report, which found that: s The data being used to score carriers is inconsistent due to variances in inspection and enforcement policies state to state; s Scores for small carriers are likely to be inflated by FMCSA's methodology and prone to significant fluctuations, given the limited data available for them, and there- fore those fleets could have a hard time overcoming one inspection report; s Some data used to calculate scores in the Unsafe Driving and Crash Indicator BASICs (Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories) are self-reported and therefore subject to inaccurate, missing or misleading reports from carriers; s -ANY of the regulations used in SMS score calculations aren't violated enough to strongly associate them with crash risk. GAO determined 593 of the 750 violations it studied were violated by less than 1 per- cent of carriers; and s There's a lack of correla- tion between SMS scores and crash occurrence, as a majority of high-risk carri- ers have not crashed at all. – Kevin Jones Scan the QR code with your smartphone or visit ccjdigital.com/news/subscribe-to-news- letters to sign up for the CCJ Daily Report, a daily e-mail newsletter filled with news, analy- sis, blogs and market condition articles. COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | MARCH 2014 7 FMCSA responds with its own study This chart from GAO's report shows that one-truck owner-op- erators have an astronomically higher chance of being above the intervention threshold in the Unsafe Driving BASIC than all other carriers, especially those with more than 25 trucks.