Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa., reintroduced the Safer Trucks and Buses Act, which would reform safety scores for trucks and buses by making the scores more reflective of the company’s safety record.
The legislation, HR1371, would temporarily halt the publication of what Barletta called flawed safety scores until the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) scoring system is revamped.
The Barletta legislation requires FMCSA to stop publishing safety scores until the CSA program is fixed. Additionally, it prevents these scores from being used as evidence in liability cases. In the meantime, the bill requires the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) — an independent, nonprofit, and non-partisan organization chartered by Congress — to work with FMCSA to develop a safety score improvement plan and implement that improvement plan. Once the scores are improved, they will again be available for the public to make educated decisions about the safety of trucks and buses.
Dave Osiecki, executive vice president and chief of national advocacy at the American Trucking Associations said the ATA greatly appreciated Barletta’s efforts to improve CSA, and remove CSA scores from public view until the much-needed improvements are made.
The American Trucking Associations leaders have also urged FMCSA to change the CSA’s safety measurement system so that crashes are not posted on the list of carriers on the agency’s website. The current procedure makes carrier crash data publicly available without specifying who is at fault in a crash.
“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,” ATA President Bill Graves said.
While everyone throughout the industry and even the enforcement community seem to agree the CSA scoring mechanism is flawed, some have stopped shy of asking for the scores to be taken down. The Arkansas Trucking Association Board of Directors recently voted to keep the information public to while improvements are sought. Board members contended that having the information public causes companies and drivers to be more safety conscious and that taking the scores down might decrease the urgency of the desired fix.
