Members of Congress Quiz FMCSA on Oversight

WASHINGTON – The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has improved its oversight and compliance reviews of high-risk carriers, but work remains to be done, members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee were told July 11, according to the Web site www.etrucker.com.

The Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999, which created the FMCSA, required the agency to reduce fatalities involving commercial motor vehicles by 50 percent by 2009, and to submit a plan to Congress to quantify the agency’s progress. In 1999, more than 5,365 individuals were killed in large truck crashes compared to 5,212 in 2005, an improvement of less than three percent.

Since FMCSA’s 2004 review of SafeStat, the number of large-truck crashes reported has improved 32 percent.

The FMCSA has made important progress, but that progress appears to have leveled out, and further reductions in the fatality rate will be difficult to achieve, said Calvin Scovell, inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation.

As part of FMCSA’s CSA 2010 initiative, violations will be evaluated monthly to determine the motor carrier’s status, rather than waiting for an on-site review. A pilot test of CSA 2010 will be conducted in four states.

True safety evaluations depend not just on crash data but on driver and carrier data, and CSA 2010 will include both drivers and carriers.

Past crashes are the best determinant of future crashes, said Susan Fleming, director of physical infrastructure issues for the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress. The GAO recently estimated that if FMCSA used a statistical approach, it could increase its ability to identify high-risk carriers by about 9 percent over SafeStat, according to the www.etrucker.com.

U.S. Rep. Todd Platts, R-Pa., asked Hill whether any progress has been made in improving the commercial driver’s licensing process.

Plans are being drawn to merge the medical and CDL certifications, and a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the training of entry-level drivers is pending.

Missing crash data can seriously affect the ranking of a motor carrier, leading to either more or less oversight than is appropriate. For example, a high-risk carrier with many unreported nonfatal crashes might not be targeted for FMCSA’s attention, even when it should be.