The new safety frontier

Many carriers already are experiencing some big changes that Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 will bring to regulatory compliance.

Although the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 program isn’t scheduled to go live for another four months, thousands of carriers already have experienced much of what the program will have to offer. CSA 2010 is a new model for safety measurement and enforcement that will replace the current SafeStat regime.

FMCSA still must conduct a rulemaking to allow it to make safety fitness determinations based on safety data consisting of crashes, inspections and violation history rather than standard compliance reviews. But for the most part, the essentials of CSA 2010 have been in place since the operational test began in February 2008 in four states – Colorado, Georgia, Missouri and New Jersey. Since then, another five states – Delaware, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota and Montana – have joined on. About half of the carriers in each state are participating in the test; the other half are in a “control” group so that FMCSA can analyze the new program’s impact on safety.

FMCSA plans to have CSA 2010 in place nationwide by the end of 2010, with a national rollout beginning in July. As many carriers already are seeing on a trial basis, CSA 2010 will reshape the compliance regime for the entire trucking industry.

A comprehensive look

CSA 2010 does many things in a different manner than the current SafeStat system. For one, it casts a wider net to include “all violations” in the safety scoring system rather than just out-of-service violations, tickets and crashes. The new Safety Measurement System weighs violations based on recent research concerning the degree to which the violation contributes to the cause or severity of crashes, FMCSA says. The SMS also weighs violations by time so that recent violations count more.

The program also separates driver-related violations into multiple categories to highlight specific deficiencies that might have been masked by lumping all driver-related problems into a single driver Safety Evaluation Area (SEA) score, as was the protocol under SafeStat. Gone will be the accident, driver, vehicle and safety management SEAs, and in their place will be seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs: