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Heard at TIA
Vigillo is speaking and exhibiting at the Transportation Intermediaries Assn meeting in San Antonio this week. Yesterday, I sat in on a 2-hour general session where Mr. Jack Van Steenburg, Deputy Administrator at FMCSA spoke to the group about changes, and status of CSA. Thought I’d share a few of his thoughts with you.
1. Highway Reauthorization may include language requiring some sort of “testing” for brokers. Not a lot of detail, but worth keeping an eye on.
2. Violations associated with roadside inspections are down 9% last year overall, 12% for driver violations.
3. Closed Enforcement cases are up about 10% to $32M in fiscal 2011. Q: What drove down violations 9%? Was it CSA, or punishing fines and penalties? (Also some confusion as to whether the decrease in violations is on a fiscal or calendar year)
4. The Crash Accountability panel is indeed stopped. I use the word stopped becasue Jack indicated that it is not dead, just pulled back into the bay for a little re-working. My sorry analogy, not his. We’ll see, election year and all.
5. Hazmat BASIC is on track, preview to be released to carriers next week. Here’s the new info…THE AGENCY IS ADDING 112 NEW VIOLATIONS to the Hazmat BASIC that are not currently a part of CSA. We’re digging to find out what they are and their severity weights.
Stay Tuned, more to come.
6.
Data Drives Trucking
The Trucking Industry is awash with data. The FMCSA collects mountains of data about commercial motor carriers and makes most of it available to the public through a network of web sites. Licensing and Insurance, Operating Authority, Motor Carrier Profile, and now CSA data are all being used by your customers, competitors, and lawyers to understand the overall safety profile of over 1.2M motor carriers.
- A late 2011 shipper survey conducted by Morgan Stanley & Co. found that 55 percent of those polled were afraid to use a carrier if even one of its seven BASIC scores came in above the CSA threshold.
- A prominent attorney recently declared CSA the “full employment act” for attorneys in trucking for the next 15 years.
- The insurance industry is beginning to focus on CSA as a guideline for premiums, even insurability of carriers.
- Brokers are increasingly using data to select carriers whose safety profiles fit their risk tolerance.
As a safety professional at a motor carrier, you need to understand not only your safety issues, but how your carrier is perceived by others when they look at the industry. Do you know how you benchmark against your competition?
- How many Carriers of your size, in your state have CSA Alerts?
- How many Carriers in your state market themselves as hauling the same cargo types that you do?
- How many of those Carriers have better CSA Scores than you do?
- How many Carriers of your size have more BIPD Insurance than you do?
- How many Carriers in your neighboring States have broker authority?
- Who are the new Carriers added to SMS this month?
Carrier Select, from Vigillo, combines publicly available data from 28 different data sources into one easy to use software application, updated continuously, and available to Carriers for a low cost annual license fee. Contact Vigillo Sales for more information or downlaod an Informational Flyer.
TWO-WEEK FREE TRIAL OF CARRIER SELECT
Breaking news from Transcomp, Atlanta
Breaking news from Transcomp, Atlanta: Jack Van Steenberg, assistant administrator FMCSA, shared some snippets in a presentation on CSA he made this morning at the Transcomp exhibition in Atlanta, GA.
FMCSA reports that the new crash accountability panel, consisting of staff “currently being hired” will operate for two years, then Crash BASIC will be made public.
120,000 crashes per year potentially reviewed by crash panel, current belief is tha 40% are fault of the truck driver
Crash panel challenges will be handled through DataQs
FMCSA will release guidelines for shippers for selecting carriers within the next 2 months
FMCSA reports that 83% of carriers who received warning letters had CSA scores drop in subsequent months.
FMCSA received data from over 3.5 M roadside inspections last year, one third of which were clean inspections.
LATEST ON HAZMAT CHANGE
Mr. Van Steenberg also reported that the agency is looking at removing non-Hazmat violations from the Cargo BASIC, rolling them into Maintenance, and leaving a new HAZMAT BASIC “that would be made public immediately” I asked during Q&A what the agency’s timing is on the release of this new BASIC. A: “We will do two major updates in 2012. one early in the year, one later in the year…it will not be in the first one”
Unified Registration System: Comments open
The goal of the Unified Registration System is to streamline the registration process and make it harder for “chameleon” carriers and brokers to come back to life. The system would be online, using DOT’s to identify carriers, brokers, freight forwarders, etc. Additional goals include assurances to the public that carriers have appropriate insurance on file, increase accessibility, and enable the FMCSA to more easily track insurance cancelations. The new entrant registration and those registration updates would shift to an online process with the option of doing a paper registration. All would be required to update their information every two years.
The regulations and fees have been posted and comments have been opened. Comments must be made before December 27th.
Make comments here: http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=FMCSA-1997-2349-0178
Check it out here: http://www.safersys.org/UCRQueryForm.aspx