Trucking groups on FMCSA’s crash accountability study: Incomplete data in CSA still inexcusable

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced last week it had concluded that implementing some form of crash fault assignment or “crash accountability” into its Compliance, Safety, Accountability program would not affect scores meaningfully and would be overly complicated to do.

Industry groups, however, have expressed disagreement and disappointment with the agency’s conclusions, which FMCSA released last week within a study. Click here to read more on the study and the agency’s conclusions and methodology.

David Owen, President of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies, said in a phone interview that his association stands by the need to account for accident fault. He suggested the agency adopt a simple weighting system to account for crashes where there was no or shared fault determination, crashes that were clearly the fault of the truck driver and crashes that were clearly not the truck driver’s fault. “These weighted adjustments,” he said, would “represent a fair approach” and would be “easily accomplished.”

For shared or undetermined fault, he said, assign a weight of 2. For accidents clearly the truck driver’s fault: 4; clearly not the fault of the trucker: .01.

The current system, he added, “totally discriminates” against carriers unlucky enough to have been involved in a crash that was in no way the driver’s fault. “The only thing the industry wants is to get rid of the absurd situations where it’s obvious” the trucker did nothing wrong.

Such as one American Trucking Associations’ Executive Vice President Dave Osiecki pointed to just last week in the wake of FMCSA’s announcement on crash weighting. “Instances where a truck is rear-ended by a drunk driver, or hit head-on by a motorist traveling in the wrong direction on the interstate, or as happened just Monday [last week] when a truck was struck by a collapsing bridge are clearly not the fault of the professional driver,” Osiecki said, “and certainly should not be used to target his or her carrier for potentially intrusive government oversight.”

Both ATA and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Associations released statements last week reiterating their stance on crash fault weighting in CSA: The program has a potentially major problem with fairness if crash accountability continues to be left out, they noted, echoing NASTC.