CSA 2010 and What It Means For Commercial Motor Carriers

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) was created as a separate modal administration in the U.S. Department of Transportation in 1999, with primary responsibility for reducing crashes, deaths, and injuries involving large trucks and buses operating in interstate commerce. The primary tool the agency uses to identify and deal with unsafe carriers is the compliance review (CR), which is a detailed inspection of a motor carrier's operations at its place of business. Currently, the FMCSA decides which carriers to inspect primarily by using an automated data system called the Motor Carrier Safety Status Measurement System (SafeStat), which uses data on crashes as well as on vehicle and driver violations, and then assigns each carrier a priority to receive a CR. In order to broaden and make more effective its enforcement efforts, nearly a decade ago the FMCSA began to develop a new program, named the Comprehensive Safety Analysis (CSA) 2010. This article looks at the CSA 2010 program, specifically focusing on major changes to 2 existing enforcement tools used by federal and state enforcement officials in regulating the commercial motor carrier industry: 1) the measurement system and interventions used to identify the remediate potentially unsafe carriers; and 2) the rating system used to determine the overall safety rating of the carrier.