Implementing some form of crash accountability — that is, not dinging carriers for crashes they couldn’t prevent — in the federal Compliance, Safety, Accountability carrier ranking/scoring program could have a significant impact on carriers’ rankings within the system, concludes the American Transportation Research Institute in a report released Nov. 10.
And, ATRI’s report concludes, changing the rankings is not just an issue of fairness: The Crash Indicator BASIC can cause carriers to lose business, drive insurance costs higher, tangle carriers in litigation and tie up trucks and drivers with more frequent inspections.
In a review of 15 carriers’ CSA ratings in the Crash Indicator BASIC, all but one carrier had their rankings fall and half saw them fall by more than 5 percent when ATRI weeded out so-deemed “non-preventable crashes.”
Three carriers saw their Crash Indicator ranking change more than 10 percent, and two others’ changed by 9 percent and 7.1 percent, respectively. The biggest change for any single carrier was a 14-percent drop. The carrier whose score didn’t fall was unchanged.
ATRI’s report runs counter to a January-released study from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, who concluded then the CSA program as a whole wouldn’t change much if some form of crash accountability were implemented. FMCSA also concluded implementation of such a system would be costly and yield little benefit to carriers.
But the studies were much different, as were the intentions of the researchers for each.
Whereas FMCSA’s study concentrated more on a cost-benefit analysis of implementing a crash weighting system, ATRI’s report focused on removing from the 14 carriers’ scores points associated with crashes in which fault could not be attributed to the carrier.
