Reliability scores from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program in evaluating the safety of individual trucking companies has recently been issued in a white paper report by the American c.
“ATA continues to support the objectives of CSA and to call for improvements to the program, “ ATA president and CEP Bill Graves said. “However, data and methodology problems continue to plague the system and the accuracy and reliability of companies’ scores.”
In the ATA’s paper, data and research on the connection between CSA scores and crash risk was examined. The paper also looked at problems with data and methodology and how it produces an imperfect and unreliable measure of a carrier’s safety record.
“It may make sense for the FMSCA to use scores in those categories that correlate positively with crash risk to prioritize companies for enforcement review,” said Graves. “In the process, FMSCA can verify whether or not the scores paint an accurate picture. But third parties need to know that for the purposes of drawing conclusions about individual carriers, the scores are unreliable.”
According to research city by ATA, scores in at least three of the system’s measurement categories don’t bear a positive correlation to crash risk. Even in those categories that generally have a positive correlation to crash risk, the paper points out that there are tens of thousands of real-world exceptions.
