After years of buildup and preparation, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration rolled out its new safety monitoring program — Compliance, Safety, Accountability — in late 2010. The intent of CSA is to improve highway safety and reduce crashes by better identifying unsafe freight carriers. While the main targets conceptually may be unsafe over-the-road carriers, the regulation covers all DOT-registered vehicles used in interstate commerce, including regional and local operations, as well as carriers of hazardous materials and passengers.

The CSA program legally covers a lot of businesses and truck-using operations that otherwise might not consider themselves subject to the regulations. Practically speaking, however, most metropolitan businesses running light- and medium-duty trucks probably will not be involved in or notice CSA. Nevertheless, the rules cover many Light & Medium Truck readers and, for that reason, we are presenting an overview of some of the key elements of the program.

The goal of the program is to “empower [carriers] to take action before safety problems occur,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said when CSA was launched. The program is establishing a database of carriers and assigning safety ratings based on how each carrier scores on a number of factors.

Scores will be updated routinely in seven safety performance categories, called BASICs, and each carrier will rank with other fleets that have similar exposure to risk of accidents. As in golf, the lower the score, the better.

CSA reviews each trucking operation’s safety standing, which will rise or fall with changes in its monthly CSA score.

The goal, in the words of FMCSA, is to reduce the number of truck-involved crashes, injuries and fatalities by identifying and correcting specific safety problems before they contribute to a crash.

Replacing an Outdated System
Before CSA, FMCSA’s principal safety enforcement program, Safe-Stat, relied on labor-intensive, time-consuming safety audits at carrier facilities.

Most CSA data will be collected at weigh stations and roadside safety inspections by motor carrier enforcement officers.

John Hill, a former FMCSA administrator and one of the architects of CSA, said that, under SafeStat, federal and state investigators examined only 1% or 2% of commercial truck and bus operations in a year.

"You’re really not getting out there and evaluating safety performance,” he said. “You’re being very reactive in terms of how you go after the bad actors."

Under SafeStat, FMCSA interacted with 16,000 to 17,000 carrier entities each year. Officials expect that number to grow exponentially under CSA.

In early March, FMCSA sent out a batch of 23,000 “warning” letters to carriers, with a total of about 50,000 to be sent within several months, Boyd Stephenson, manager of safety and security for American Trucking Associations, told L&MT. Those letters will reach about 8% of the 650,000 carriers FMCSA counts, based on agency statistics.

Warning letters advise fleets that their performance merited “alert” status by falling below acceptable levels on at least one of CSA’s BASIC standards. The letters go to trucking companies and bus companies.

The new approach hones in on the causes of safety faults, drawing on a wider range of data than SafeStat used. All roadside inspections — including moving violations, warnings and other “non-out-of-service” events — will figure in the scoring.

And the higher a score, the more likely it will be noticed.

“If you get any type of interaction with an agency, you are [going to show up] on the radar screen,” said Stephen Keppler, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance. CVSA represents state officials charged with overseeing trucking safety on the road.

“That’s one of the big benefits of CSA 2010: the ability to ‘touch’ more carriers,” Keppler said.

“Just because you get a warning letter doesn’t mean you are a bad carrier,” he said, noting that the agency’s tightest focus will be on 7,900 highest-risk carriers with the worst safety performance.

For affected carriers, the breadth and depth of CSA will pose challenges for even the better, safer fleets.

“We’ll have to focus more diligently on a broader range of issues than ever before,” said Steve Gordon, chief operating officer of Gordon Trucking Inc., Pacific, Wash., which hauls regionally for such retailers as General Mills, Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and Home Depot.

He mentioned violations that currently don’t have as much effect on carrier safety departments or drivers as out-of-service items.

Under CSA, overweight tickets, speeding tickets, lower-level log infractions and small maintenance issues will count against a carrier’s score and could lead to intervention from FMCSA.