Open deck carriers face more scrutiny under CSA 2010’s cargo-related BASIC.
When the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 initiative rolls out later this year, the agency will have a more robust data set with which to rate commercial carrier safety performance. The expansion from four safety evaluation area (SEA) categories under the current Safety Status Measurement System (SafeStat) to the seven spelled out in CSA 2010’s Behavior Analysis Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) has new consequences for most industry groups. And with the change to CSA 2010, all violations count and are weighted based on time and severity. SafeStat only takes into account violations that lead to out-of-service orders.
But one new safety category exposes open deck carriers in particular to a new set of worries. Specifically, CSA 2010 breaks cargo-related issues – currently lumped into SafeStat’s Vehicle SEA – into a category of its own, with a heavy emphasis on load securement. Although the category includes all carriers and load types, open deck carriers – whose loads are visible at all times by local and state law enforcement and scale-house operators – will face the lion’s share of scrutiny under the new system.
When FMCSA first designed the BASICs structure, the agency recognized that issues such as cargo and tiedown regulations aren’t necessarily associated with the integrity of the vehicle itself or whether or not the vehicle is maintained, so it created a new category. It also wanted to identify the potential impact of improperly secured loads on crash causation.
Another difference between CSA 2010 and its predecessor that affects open deck carriers is in the unsafe driving BASIC. “Speed and permitting issues were never on the radar because they didn’t pop up on the SEA value,” says Capt. Dan Meyer, Kansas Highway Patrol and head of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s Driver Traffic Enforcement Committee. “The weight and oversize violations cited by states fall under [FMCSR Part] 392.2 local law definitions. That goes into the unsafe driving BASIC. If they aren’t properly loaded or don’t have proper permits, they can accumulate points for those violations.”
Point system up for debate
Each violation under CSA 2010, whether out-of-service or not, is assigned a severity weight – 1 through 10, with 10 being the most severe – based on the likelihood the violation may contribute to a crash. Dean Newell, vice president of safety and driver training for Little Rock, Ark.-based Maverick Transportation, has concerns with how FMCSA has assigned point values to some of the violations and how they are enforced, echoing the sentiment among many open deck carriers.
“If the law says a load requires five securement devices, we normally require our drivers to use six or seven,” Newell says. “If a driver gets pulled over and has five securements that are tight and one that is loose, that counts as a violation, even if the loose strap is the extra one that wasn’t required to begin with. That is going a little too far.”
Industry leaders are calling for FMCSA to re-evaluate the severity weight structure for load securement violations and place a higher weight on out-of-service violations and lower points on other violations. “If it doesn’t put you out of service, it shouldn’t cost you 10 points,” says Gary Salisbury, president and chief executive officer of Hope, Ark.-based Fikes Truck Line and chairman of the Truckload Carriers Association’s Open Deck Division. “Once CSA 2010 gets out and we get used to it, it will be a great thing, but it needs some tweaking. Safer roads above all – that is what the trucking industry wants.”
Recognizing the potential to improve the scoring system, FMCSA indicates it is willing to listen to industry groups and re-examine the severity weights assigned to certain violations, including cargo-related violations. “We’ve been hearing a lot of reaction from industry groups,” says Bryan Price, FMCSA senior transportation specialist. “We’re amenable to getting additional input from a group of industry and enforcement representatives on a completely different systematic approach to assigning these severity weights.”
A detailed description of all cargo-related BASIC violations can be found at http://csa2010.fmcsa.dot.gov/about/BASICs.aspx.
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