FMCSA Ignores Calls to Improve Highway Safety Today

QualifiedCarriers.com, TIA and other industry have asked FMCSA to address these needs each of these enhancements are simple data pushes. FMCSA has the data, and must share it through its public data files. Unlike the ambiguity of CSA, these items will have an immediate and positive impact on highway safety. Plus, this is what shippers and brokers really need to know. Even FMCSA doesn’t know what a 62 BASIC score means to a carrier’s safety fitness, but everybody knows that it’s business suicide to use a carrier who has been placed out of service. FMCSA has not responded to the following requests for months, yet they push CSA.

 1. FMCSA does not have the regulatory authority to revoke the authority of new carriers who they place out of service (OOS)! Yet they don’t send that data to the public in one of their downloadable files, so brokers and shippers can use it in their risk or operating systems.

2. FMCSA does not have regulatory authority to revoke the  operating authority of carriers with whom they enter a negotiated settlement to correct deficiencies, and the carrier fails to rectify them. FMCSA places the carrier OOS, yet they don’t send that data to the public in one of their downloadable files, so brokers and shippers can use it in their risk or operating systems.

3. When a carrier fails its compliance review, it receives an “Unsatisfactory” safety rating. FMCSA does have the authority to revoke that carrier’s operating authority, but due to the fact that one department has to email an OOS message to another department, email sometimes fails, and the carrier remains operating for months, even years. We asked FMCSA to publish the OOS, so if any email doesn’t go through, at least the public picks up on the OOS, and avoids using such a carrier.

4. By law, FMCSA is required to maintain a “high risk carrier” database and report to Congress what it’s doing about it. FMCSA plans to replace safety rating, with safety fitness determination (SFD) in a year or two. When they do, there is widespread speculation that those high risk carriers will have SFD’s equivalent “unsafe” rating. We have asked FMCSA to post all of the high risk carriers daily, to one of its several publicly available data files, so that industry can make swift use of that data, and stop using those carriers.

5. FMCSA and PHMSA have no way of talking or synchronizing their data. FMCSA does not know what carriers have hazmat certificates! PHMSA, the agency that issues the hazmat certificates, has a database that they, themselves, can’t validate, due to high number of errors. Neither shippers nor brokers nor the DOT itself can validate which carriers have a valid hazmat certificate! Yet, FMCSA plans to introduce a new hazmat BASIC score, essentially guessing who the hazmat carriers are, and reporting on them.

We invite letters and emails to be sent to FMCSA Administrator Ferro (anne.ferro@dot.gov) asking her to focus on the real issues that shippers and brokers care about, and leave CSA to her own use

FMCSA Drafts Shipper & Broker Guidelines Nobody Wanted

Despite warnings, requests and pleading by shipper and broker groups to the contrary, FMCSA forged ahead with guidance documents for “shippers, brokers and insurance companies” to use CSA scores in their carrier selection decision making. When word of the potential of these documents was learned, QualifiedCarriers.com, and the largest broker and shipper trade associations, TIA and National Industrial Transportation League (“NITL”) set an appointment with FMCSA, to stop, shelve, delay, or at least thoughtfully draft such a document, to avoid catastrophic consequences from misuse. FMCSA agreed at least twice, in public forums, it would talk with industry to hear its concerns before publishing.

So we were shocked when FMCSA published its documents one week before that meeting was to take place! Not only were shippers and brokers blindsided, but the documents published by FMCSA contained errors and misstatements. Another document falsely stated that FMCSA held “listening sessions with TIA and NITL,” and that the documents were in response to their requests—patently untrue.

CSA is very early into the first of two phases. It’s a young program that does not arrive at a safety rating, or safety fitness determination. It needs time to fill in enormous gaps in the data. Its methodology must mature and the agency must complete its most important, phase two. At that point, it will decide how the data may be combined, and used to determine a carrier’s safety fitness. This might happen in 2014. So, if FMCSA itself hasn’t figured out how to use BASIC scores to measure safety fitness, however could a shipper or broker?

We hope FMCSA begins to describes the CSA system appropriately, as a new system with a lot of promise, that it and its law enforcement colleagues use internally, to prioritize their resources, and leave shippers and brokers out of it.

ADVOCACY: QualifiedCarriers.com Founder Testifies Before Congress

Our co-founder and CEO Jeff Tucker testified in Congress July 11, before the House of Representatives Small Business Committee, on the harm FMCSA is causing to small business. In May 2012, despite several meetings and discussions where shipper and broker groups pleaded with FMCSA executive staff, FMCSA shocked and disappointed shippers and brokers by publishing three (3) documents intended to guide shippers and brokers on how to use CSA/BASICs to select carriers. Worse, the documents contain many misleading and false statements.  By doing so, they have given accident lawyers jet fuel for their lawsuits against shippers and brokers who hire carriers. Meanwhile, they have ignored simple solutions to share with the public their worst of the worst carriers, their “high risk” carriers.

Under Federal law, FMCSA has one determination of a carrier’s fitness—safety rating. BASICS are not safety ratings. They may one day be the building blocks of a future safety rating (safety fitness determination), but they are not so today. Today, 2/7 of BASICs are hidden by FMCSA, and 2/3 of all carriers don’t even have one BASIC score at all—18 months into CSA! Two recent studies conclude there is no correlation to crash risk for any BASIC.  

The House Small Business Committee members took the issue seriously, and took FMCSA to task for several key items. Of significant concern, were: (a) FMCSA’s 2 year refusal to release the study that shows accidents not the fault of the truck drivers still correlate to truck driver accidents; (b) that FMCSA would presume a trucker guilty in 100% accidents; (c) 2 studies show CSA BASICs don’t correlate to crash.  We will keep up the fight. We’re hoping for a more receptive FMCSA in the future.