Although the American Trucking Associations is not joining in litigation to block Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010, it is asking for further changes before carriers’ rankings under the program are made public.

In a related development, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it won’t implement the new system until at least Dec. 12.

Boyd Stephenson, ATA’s manager of safety & security operations, noted in a Nov. 29 letter to FMCSA’s CSA program manager that carriers’ scores in five of the seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) are set to be visible to the public. “Before the agency chooses to disclose this data, it should ensure that these BASICs accurately predict crash risk,” Stephenson said.

“Until FMCSA can confirm that the system accurately identifies unsafe carriers in a category, it is inappropriate to make carriers’ scores in that category publicly available, as they may erroneously label safe, responsible carriers as unsafe,” ATA said. To improve the link between BASICs scores and crash risk, ATA recommends several steps:
•  Modify severity weights so that they more accurately reflect crash risk;
•  Control for risk disparities among “generic” violations (situations where violations of varying degrees are lumped together);
•  Ensure industry segments are compared against their peers; and
•  Test the system to ensure that it accurately identifies carriers that are unsafe.

ATA pointed to a number of violations, mostly in the Cargo-Related BASIC, where its members have identified severity weights that significantly exceed crash risk. On the other hand, there are some situations — possession or under the influence of alcohol less than four hours before driving or inadequate brakes for safe stopping, for example — where FMCSA’s severity weight appears too low.

ATA noted that in developing its violation severity weightings, FMCSA convened a group of agency and state enforcement officials to examine the severity weights suggested by its research and confirm that those weights conform to experiences in the field.