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Members of Congress quiz FMCSA on oversight
By Dean
Smallwood
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration 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.
"We have significantly increased our compliance reviews since 2004," FMCSA Administrator John Hill told the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit. States deserves much of the credit, said Hill, who credited California and Minnesota in particular.
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 3 percent.
Better crash information needs to be gathered from states, Hill said. Since FMCSA's 2004 review of SafeStat, the number of large-truck crashes reported has improved 32 percent, Hill said. "The problem is that pockets of the country haven't seen that data improvement," he said. States have to improve data quality, and nonfatal crashes are "the next arena we have to move into," Hill said.
The FMCSA has made important progress, but that progress appears to have "flatlined," and further reductions in the fatality rate will be difficult to achieve, said Calvin Scovell, inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
"One of the concerns I have is a large majority of drivers still don't wear safety belts," said Scovell, who described high-tech safety systems such as lane-departure warning systems as "probably the wave of the future." Companies will need incentives to adopt such expensive technology, Scovell said.
U.S. Rep. Peter A. DeFazio, D-Ore., asked what criteria are used to determine whether a driver is unsatisfactory.
"There is a mechanism to place a driver out of service," Hill said. "We certainly take action when we determine it's occurred, but that's a very labor-intensive process." A roadside computer check can be conducted to determine if a driver already has been fined, Hill said.
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, said Hill, who added that 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, said Deborah Hersman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board.
Hill said CSA 2010 will include both drivers and carriers.
"We made this recommendation in 1999," Hersman said. "It would be ambitious to get it done by 2010."
U.S. Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-Calif., asked Scovell, "What is the major issue? How can we address this issue?"
Scovell's response: "We believe a prime focus should be on the driver."
"Would tamper-proof safety logging help?" Napolitano asked.
"That would help us, as far as documenting hours of service and false logbook entries," Scovell said.
Past crashes are the best determinant of future crashes, said Susan Fleming, director of physical infrastructure issues for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 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.
The FMSCA is trying to make the most of its limited resources, Fleming said. With CSA 2010, “They're trying to get the biggest bang for their buck,” she said.
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, Hill said, and a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the training of entry-level drivers is pending, he hopes later this year. “The industry is very interested in this issue,” Hill said.
Missing crash data can seriously affect the ranking of a motor carrier, leading to either more or less oversight than is appropriate, Scovell said. For example, a high-risk carrier with many unreported nonfatal crashes might not be targeted for FMCSA’s attention, even when it should be, Scovell said.
"We do not know how many nonfatal crashes are missing from the FMCSA data, but independent assessments of crash data completeness for 15 states have shown that only 64 percent of the nonfatal large truck crashes that should have been reported were included in FMCSA’s database," he said.
The FMCSA should undertake a data quality study, managed by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, Scovell said. “A 'back-to-basics' approach would help,” he said. The FMCSA should help states train their own people in obtaining accurate nonfatal crash data, he said.
Much discussion centered on a fatal March truck crash on the Washington Beltway. The truck driver, who worked for B.K. Trucking of New Jersey, had a suspended CDL and had received driving citations in six states, including citations for speeding, careless driving, inattentive driving, driving with defective brakes and driving with a suspended license.
B.K. Trucking had undergone an FMCSA compliance review in February based on its SafeStat ranking, but that review did not flag that driver's serious problems because he was reported as an owner-operator leased to B.K. Compliance reviews focus on company drivers, so that driver wasn't included when license checks were conducted. After the accident, B.K. Trucking was ordered out of service.
While carriers are responsible for their owner-operators' driving records, the "loophole" is that carriers know their owner-operators aren't subject to federal compliance checks, Scovell said.
“We are now instituting better training to our people to better understand leases," Hill said in response. "The second thing, with companies with 20 drivers or less, we’re going to run checks on all those drivers, period.”
DeFazio asked why FMCSA wouldn't include carriers with more than 20 drivers.
It's a matter of manpower, Hill replied, and it wouldn't be practical to check all of the drivers at a huge fleet such as Schneider National. “90 percent of the carriers have 10 trucks or less,” Hill said.
DeFazio asked Hill why B.K. Trucking wasn't placed out of service until after the fatal accident, not before.
"FMCSA is working to provide motor carriers with the information they need to check the records of their drivers," Hill said. |
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