The American Trucking Associations is asking the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to remove non-fault accidents from motor carriers’ scores on the Compliance, Safety, Accountability system. Following up on the FMCSA’s report that such a move would not be fiscally viable, the ATA submitted official comments to the agency.
“ATA identified the inclusion of all crashes, regardless of responsibility, as a serious shortcoming of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability system over five years ago,” said the group in its comments. “It is illogical and a poor use of scarce enforcement resources to label carriers as unsafe based on crashes they did not cause.”
The association provided examples of tractor-trailer involved accidents that are currently included in carrier scores despite obvious evidence that the truck driver was not at fault. In one accident that occurred March 20, 2015, a car carrying three off-duty New Jersey police officers struck a semi while traveling the wrong way on a divided highway. In Texas, on the same day, another wrong-way driver hit a semi head on. The driver at fault in that crash is suspected to have been intoxicated. March 24, 2015, a drunk driver in Washington, D.C., hit a parked tractor-trailer. All three accidents involved fatalities.
“Merely being struck by another motorist does not make one more likely to strike others,” said the ATA, adding that the goal of CSA should be “to identify the predictive value of crashes in the same way the agency does with violations. Crashes that a commercial motor vehicle driver did not cause are not indicative of the motor carrier’s propensity to cause a future crash.”
The FMCSA does not consider not-at-fault accidents when assigning a carrier’s official safety rating after an audit, but those accidents are still available to the public on the CSA website, where they are interpreted as a reflection of safety performance.
“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 and its encouragement that the public make decisions based on what they know to be faulty information,” said ATA President and CEO Bill Graves. “We have raised this issue, and Congress has raised this issue. It is time for FMCSA to do what it knows is right [and] make this common sense change.”
Source: American Trucking Associations