While the American Trucking Associations has had a positive reaction to the changes the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration made to its CSA 2010 methodology, the group is still pushing the FMCSA to address the issue of crash accountability.

This week, the ATA sent a letter to FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro, asking for FMCSA's timeline for establishing a new process for making crash accountability determinations before crashes are entered and used in the CSA 2010 safety measurement system.

In the letter, Dave Osiecki, senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs at ATA, asked the agency to remove the following types of crashes from the safety measurement system, subsequent to a properly filed DataQs request: documented suicides; crashes involving a vehicle operating in the wrong direction; crashes involving a vehicle rear-ending a truck while legally stopped at a traffic light; and crashes involving a vehicle striking a truck while legally parked off the road or highway.

"It's reasonable and appropriate, in ATA's view, to suggest that the commercial driver and carrier involved in each of these types of crashes should be presumed to have no accountability in the crash and, therefore, removal of such crashes should be a matter of agency policy," Osiecki said in the letter.

Osiecki also said removing these crashes will help FMCSA better target its enforcement resources toward carriers needing the attention.