CSA

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association has filed a second complaint with the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regarding its safety records and the DataQ appeal process.

“CSA has had an effect on safety, but people want to make sure their scores are correct and fair,” and there is some question about the how effective the program is in improving safety, said Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy, American Trucking Associations during an update on the program at the recent Zonar user’s conference held in San Antonio last week.

It is not too often in the trucking industry that regulation is seen as a good thing. Yet the recent Compliance, Safety, Accountability regulations may prove the exception to the rule, at least when it comes to the heavy-duty aftermarket.

An advisory committee for the CSA safety enforcement program dove deep into the complex details and emerged with some consensus and some irreconcilable differences.

We have officially entered the CSA era of regulation from the U.S. Department of Transportation. With this, we will see changes in commercial driver s license standards and driver qualification — and likely an increased emphasis on driver wellness.

Newly released results from a survey of fleets show more are adopting e-logs to monitor driver compliance with hours-of-service regulations. The survey also reveals what they are doing and how much it costs to comply with the CSA program, as well as plans for adding capacity that include more plan to add independent contractor drivers.

Despite all of the folklore that has been built around it, at its core, CSA (Compliance, Safety, Accountability) is simply a program used by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to track and evaluate carriers based on compliance and crash history. Carriers that do not score well in the system are the ones FMCSA will spend time warning or investigating.

Required driver pre-trip inspections have garnered more attention under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s new Compliance, Safety, Accountability enforcement program. And it’s not only the actual inspections you need to think about – it’s also the paperwork component.

With the advent of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s flagship Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, a new premium was put on safety. This required a number of fleets to focus on the issue like never before.

A new report released by the American Trucking Associations summarizes the car-truck relative contribution/fault findings of several large-scale studies.

Police accident reports are not reliable enough to determine who’s at fault in truck crashes for the CSA safety enforcement system, according to an accident reconstruction specialist during a CSA advisory panel meeting Tuesday. Washington Editor Oliver B. Patton reports.

The 2013 edition of the North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria Handbook and Pictorial is now available for order from CVSA.

In December, the FMCSA made good on its commitment to Congress to install refinements to the CSA initiative by implementing 11 changes to the Safety Measurement System. J.J. Keller's Bob Rose has more details.

Following up on a request from Congress, the Department of Transportation's Inspector General has begin work on an audit of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program. The agency is going to look into the quality of CSA data used to evaluate carrier performance, said Assistant Inspector General Joseph Comé this week in a memo to Anne Ferro, chief of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

In the two years it has been up and running, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrations Compliance, Safety, Accountability program has demonstrated many flaws and shortcomings. But the program is credited with the signal achievement of shining a brighter light on truck safety.