In December 2010 the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced their new safety alert program for trucking companies and drivers, CSA (Compliance, Safety, Accountability). In February TransCore released an analysis of the new program, the CarrierWatch CSA 2010 Industry Report, which highlights a number of significant changes in the commercial carrier industry aimed at reducing serious trucking accidents.
The report is based on FMCSA data from approximately 166,000 interstate carriers. The report summarizes the differences between CSA and the previous program SafeStat. Generally CSA is more detailed than SafeStat with more safety categories and alerts.
BASICS Scoring and Alerts
CSA scores both carriers and their drivers in five categories called Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICS. SafeStat used only three safety categories. The BASICS are unsafe driving, fatigued driving, vehicle maintenance, driver fitness and controlled substances.
Factors that influence carrier scores include the size of the company, location of company headquarters and route locations. The different BASICS have different thresholds to determine when an alert is issued. However, for severe violations an alert can be issued when a carrier has no score or when the score has not yet crossed the threshold.
Generally, more carriers have alerts under CSA than previously with SafeStat. However, nearly 4 out of 5 carriers have no alerts. The analysis found that larger carriers had significantly lower BASIC scores than smaller carriers.
CSA data is available for 76% of all interstate freight carriers and 21% of them have at least one alert. The category with the highest number of alerts is fatigued driving, with 13% of carriers issued alerts.
Regional Differences
The analysis found state and regional differences in certain BASIC categories. For example, nine states in the southeast that border each other had the highest rates of alerts for vehicle maintenance: Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. Six of the ten states with the highest rates of alerts in general are also in the southeast: Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama.
