Truck Accident Crash Data - The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) works to reduce commercial vehicle accidents, injuries and fatalities. One of the ways it does so is by documenting accidents and sending warning letters to carriers that have failed to adhere to safety practices.
The FMCSA does this with a system called Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA), which documents a company’s compliance with safety standards and documents when accidents occur. CSA scores matter to trucking companies because that score can affect the company’s insurance rate.
While the system documents accidents, what it has not documented is the cause of the truck accident. The FMCSA is considering allowing carriers to provide police reports documenting who was responsible for causing the accident. This information would be reflected in the company safety rating and would be available to the trucking company’s insurer.
The American Trucking Association (ATA), a trucking industry organization, sees the ability to provide context to accident reports as a positive move but has several concerns:
• The system does not distinguish between preventable and unavoidable accidents.
• Police reports are not always accurate; police and highway patrol officers do not all have sufficient training in investigation techniques to accurately assess causation of trucking accidents.
• The proposed change to the system puts the responsibility of submitting the police report on the trucking company and some companies will simply not include the information. The ATA believes this would skew the results.
For consistency, the ATA has said it would like to see the FMCSA create a team trained to assess the crash data and assign accountability.
Accountability data is an important part of assessing the safety of different carriers. It helps the FMCSA reward responsible trucking companies with good ratings. It allows people seeking the services of a trucking company to choose a company with a good safety record. And it allows for negative consequences for unsafe carriers.
The ultimate goal is to improve motor vehicle safety for everyone by making it harder for unsafe carriers to operate and preventing avoidable, negligent truck accidents.
