8/31/2011 - FMCSA Releases Independent Evaluation of the CSA Op-Model Test

The U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) today released the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) independent evaluation of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program's Operational Model Test (Op-Model Test). UMTRI's findings confirm that CSA substantially improves FMCSA's enforcement and compliance model. The results confirm that the CSA model enables FMCSA and its State Partners to contact more commercial motor carriers earlier to correct safety problems and ensure compliance with safety regulations in order to reduce crashes, injuries, and fatalities related to commercial motor vehicles.

Launched in 2008, the CSA Op-Model Test divided motor carriers from four test states (Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, and New Jersey) between test and control groups. UMTRI evaluated the effectiveness of the new Safety Measurement System (SMS) and CSA interventions, and compared the cost and efficiency of the CSA compliance and enforcement model to the previous model. They found effectiveness and efficiency gains that fully support the ongoing national implementation of CSA, as outlined below. FMCSA added additional states, Delaware, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, and Montana, to the test to demonstrate full implementation challenges and to provide a validation dataset for evaluation purposes.

The study highlighted the following benefits of the CSA system:

• CSA's SMS better identifies motor carriers for safety interventions than the previous SafeStat system.
• CSA interventions are effective in improving motor carriers' safety behavior.
• CSA interventions use enforcement resources efficiently.
• CSA reaches more carriers to improve safety compliance.

The evaluator identified some areas that require improvement and FMCSA is firmly committed to a continuous improvement process for this very important program. They include:

• SMS's BASICs are significantly related to underlying motor carrier safety, although the Cargo-Related and Driver Fitness BASICs show a weaker relationship to crash risk.
• There was lag time in measureable safety performance improvement after CSA investigations, and for carriers with the most serious safety problems, improvement rates were similar to those of the control group.

Click here to view the report. Please feel free to contact Logistec/TTS with any questions.