A new era in truck safety enforcement is going to begin in December, but so far relatively few carriers have taken an active interest in what the new regime will mean to them.

Just 13,000 -- 2.6 percent -- of the 500,000 active carriers have gone online at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to see where they will stand in the new regime, said agency Administrator Anne Ferro in remarks Monday at the annual meeting of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.

Ferro encouraged the truck and bus safety enforcement members of CVSA to get the word out to the drivers they encounter on the road. Drivers and carriers need to understand that it is up to them to improve their performance, Ferro said.

(To register for access to the database go to http://csa2010.fmcsa.dot.gov/.)

Why so few carriers have logged on is something of a mystery to enforcement officials.

For the past year and more, the program has been hard to miss. Carriers that have been testing the system have described it as a "game changer" for truck safety. It has been widely discussed at industry meetings and in industry media, and has been the subject of intense, public dialogue between the industry and FMCSA -- including a hearing on Capitol Hill.

Officials surmise that some percentage of the active carriers simply are not in the information loop, or are too focused on their daily affairs to take note of a deadline that, until now, has been many months away.

Capt. Steve Dowling of the California Highway Patrol, who becomes president of CVSA at this week's meeting, said he is concerned but not completely surprised. It is the nature of many carriers to postpone action as long as they can. Now that the December deadline is looming he's seeing more interest from California carriers.

Ferro noted that even though CSA 2010 will start in December, the roll-out will take place gradually over the next year as the states get their enforcement people trained in the new system.

She also said that the CSA 2010 title will soon be changed to simply CSA, for Compliance, Safety and Accountability.

December will be a busy month for FMCSA. That's when the CSA data that is now available to carriers will be opened to the public, when FMCSA will start sending warning letters to carriers whose data does not measure up, and when the agency will start determining which deficient carriers will get field interventions.

Some time in the first half of the year the agency will publish a proposal for how it will determine safety fitness under CSA. This is a key component of the new system that in effect will decouple the Compliance Review from a carrier's safety rating and connect it instead with monthly performance data from the new Safety Management System, Ferro said.

A number of misunderstandings about CSA continue to persist in the driver community, said Bryan Price, senior transportation specialist at FMCSA. The agency is not generating a public driver scorecard, rating or ranking, he said. Also, CSA will not lead to mass CDL suspensions, and the agency has no plans to restrict the ability to drive based on physical characteristics such as weight, body mass index or neck size.

(A PDF about CSA 2010 myths, called "Just the Facts," is available at http://csa2010.fmcsa.dot.gov/documents/JustTheFacts.pdf.)