CSA's Achilles' Heel: The pubic nature of carrier data

Overdrive Radio

From the advent of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s CSA Safety Measurement System in 2010, its shortcomings were well-evident to carriers and baked into its structure. At that time, carriers were laser-focused on equities in scoring, particularly when comparing the way a small carrier's scores moved wildly with very little data input versus the slow climbs and falls with more data on the large-carrier side. As the years have gone by there's been refinement of a sense among critics of the program that the very public nature of the data underpinning what passes for CSA today is its fatal design flaw, with far too many "unintended consequences," in the words of Payne Trucking Safety Director Chris Haney, that have been at best unfair to carriers forced to contend with them on a daily basis. That’s inclusive of small fleets and owner-operators, and company drivers to an extent, too, given the increased importance of every violation you could possibly think of, large and small. For today's edition of Overdrive Radio, we're turning back to my February discussion with Haney and CVSA data director Chris Turner, formerly of the Kansas Highway Patrol, to highlight various aspects of the discussion, including Haney's view that, despite efforts to better contextualize publicly available data, too many of those unintended consequences continue to be big problems for carriers. The entire trucking, enforcement and regulator community should do a lot better, both he and Turner contend. The February discussion centered around Overdrive's Setting the Record Straight package of investigative features looking closely at FMCSA's DataQs system for correcting data collected about carriers and drivers. Access all the pieces of that package via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15063803/criticism-of-dataqs-review-system-continues-to-rise