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FMCSA's CSA crash weighting report: determining fault too costly, too difficult to achieve

Determining who is at fault in crashes is both too costly and too difficult to achieve for purposes of CSA data, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration says, adding that police reports don’t include enough viable information to judge who was at fault.

Trucking stakeholders have long argued that for a carrier or driver to get dinged on a CSA score for a wreck in which another vehicle was at fault is patently unfair, skews safety ratings and punishes safe carriers.

However the agency, which is making the comments in a crash weighting report to Congress today, argues that determining fault doesn’t improve CSA’s prediction of crash risk.

“Independent research has demonstrated that a motor carrier’s involvement in a crash, regardless of their role in the crash, is a strong indicator of their future crash risk,” FMCSA said in news release about the long-awaited report.

The agency added that the study found that changing the crash weights based on a carrier’s role in the crash “did not appear to improve the ability to predict future crash rates when all crashes are considered.”

For its report, FMCSA examined police accident reports obtained from two national datasets, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Fatality Analysis Reporting System or FARS, and the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey.

The report concluded that there was “concern about the reliability of using police accident reports” and that implementing crash weighting on a national scale would require a method for uniformly acquiring final police accident reports, a system for uniform analysis and a way to receive and analyze public input.

As to the costs and manpower involved, FMCSA estimated that processing police accident reports and including public input and reviewing appeals could cost from $3.9 million to $11.2 million.

The agency added that a CSA system that gives the public the ability to comment on crash fault is up to four times greater than the cost of the initial review of the police accident report.

According to FMCSA, the CSA Safety Measurement System includes non-fault crashes because its ability to determine fault is limited and that statistically, some of the crashes will be the truck driver’s fault anyway.

Currently, FMCSA considers all recordable crashes involving a commercial motor vehicle occurring in the preceding 24 months as an assessment within the SMS.

To read the full report, click here.

The Trucker staff can be reached to comment on this article at [email protected].

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