Well what do we do now and what does all of this data mean?
the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ("FMCSA") introduced the new Compliance Safety Accountability ('CSA") nationwide in December 2010 which has added a new level of complexity to carrier safety evaluations. The CSA program covers approximately 758,000 commercal fleets of which approxamately 161,000 are for-hire or interstate fright carriers. CSA program may potentially provide less clarity with even more data points making it more difficult for borker or shippers to evaluate or validate carriers. Of course larger carriers have more data points than smaller carriers, as 90% larger carriers have numeric scores compared to only 25% of the smallest carriers. Thus, the average scores for large carriers are also lower (better - just like the game of golf) than the average of smaller carriers.
| Fleet Size Trucks |
1-5
|
6-15
|
16-50
|
50-500
|
500 +
|
| Unsafe Driving Score |
75.0% |
50.0% |
37.2% |
28.9% |
31.6% |
| Fatigued Driving Score |
70.1% |
62.0% |
55.0% |
48.5% |
41.7% |
| Vehicle Maintenance Score |
67.0% |
59.0% |
50.4% |
45.2% |
45.8% |
| Driver Fitness Score |
93.2% |
86.2% |
76.7% |
59.7% |
49.3% |
| Controlled Substances Score |
67.3% |
49.7% |
35.7% |
23.5% |
19.6% |
The color red is an average score that exceed intervention threshold for that BASIC.
It would appear that the smaller carriers lack the resources or safety programs to maintain acceptable BASIC scores. Thus, we suggest all carriers to invest in safety programs to improve the carriers' BASIC scores and remain in business without the fear of a FMCSA intervention.