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Show Your Drivers You Care! Put a Healthy Trucking Kiosk in Your Terminal
"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
-- Peter F. Drucker
FMCSA Examines Carriers’ and Drivers’ Safety Fitness
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is developing a safety-oriented initiative that aims to identify unsafe carriers and drivers and to hold them accountable for “sustained performance by regularly determining their safety fitness.” As the term “safety fitness” implies, the FMCSA will track not only driving records but also records related to a driver’s health “to focus attention on driver physical qualifications.” Ultimately, if enough information is gathered, every carrier and driver will receive a safety rating.
Given the potential impact of the rating on carriers once the initiative is implemented, fleet managers, safety directors and recruiting directors have yet one more reason to be concerned about the health and wellness of their drivers, as well as their drivers’ safety records.
Here’s a summary of a report on the initiative:
About 5,500 people die each year as a result of crashes involving large commercial trucks or buses, and about 160,000 more are injured. While the fatality rate for these crashes has generally decreased over the last 20 years, the decline has leveled off in the most recent years. FMCSA shoulders the primary federal responsibility for reducing these crashes, fatalities and injuries and recognizes the need to make improvements if it is to achieve further substantial safety advancements.
A key FMCSA effort to improve motor carrier safety is implementing the agency’s Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 (CSA 2010) initiative. Through CSA 2010, FMCSA expects to reduce motor carrier crashes, fatalities and injuries by using better ways to identify unsafe carriers and drivers; assessing a larger portion of the motor carrier industry and holding carriers and drivers accountable for sustained performance by regularly determining their safety fitness; and expanding the range of interventions to be used with carriers and drivers that fail to comply with safety requirements. After two years of planning, testing and assessment, the initiative is expected to be fully implemented in 2010.
FMCSA expects that CSA 2010 will provide safety benefits by enabling the agency to: (1) increase its reach by assessing whether most motor carriers and drivers are safe and holding them accountable by regularly determining their safety fitness; (2) enhance its investigative and enforcement actions through the greater use of less resource-intensive interventions; and (3) improve its ability to identify safety deficiencies through better use of data. Under CSA 2010, all carriers – and eventually all drivers – with sufficient safety data available will receive a safety rating that is periodically updated.
Currently, FMCSA is able to provide safety ratings for relatively few carriers and for no drivers.
CSA 2010 will employ a progressive array of interventions that can be tailored to match the severity of the safety problems they are intended to correct. CSA 2010 intends to use new data -- such as information from police accident reports about driver-related factors contributing to a crash and by improving existing data sources (for example, using its database of licensed commercial drivers to identify all drivers with convictions for unsafe driving practices as well as the carriers they work for) -- to enable a more precise assessment of safety problems.
CSA 2010 will support evolving and new enforcement and compliance efforts. For example: (1) carriers from Canada and Mexico that operate in the United States under open border agreements will be rated under CSA 2010 in the same way as U.S. carriers; (2) violations found through audits of new entrants -- a program that FMCSA is working to strengthen -- will be used in the CSA 2010 safety measurement system; and (3) data sources related to drivers' health -- such as drivers’ confirmed positive test results for controlled substances or alcohol -- will be developed to focus attention on driver physical qualifications, a key FMCSA policy area.
