Last week, the FMCSA was supposed to revisit several areas of the new CSA safety enforcement system, but on Thursday, Anne Ferro told industry reps the agency would not make any new proposals at this time.
Ferro says safety advocacy groups raised questions about the proposals that caused her to consider the agency’s approach. The questions had to do with only using the police accident report and a carrier’s statement to determine crash accountability. Ferro said the approach is too limited because it doesn’t allow for comment from others impacted by the crash.
Co-founder and president of Road Safe America, Steve Owings says there is “a very clear coorelation between past and future crashes, regardless of who was at fault.
Ferro echoed Owning’s sentiment saying, the data shows there is a “very, very clear correlation between crash experience from year to year.”
Trucking safety scientist, Ron Kripling agrees with Owings and Ferro and says that including non-accountable crashes in the database increases the numbers and thus strengthens the relationship between past at-fault crashes and future risk.
None of the interviewed could explain why a no-fault crash would accurately predict a greater risk of a crash in the future.
Read more about CSA crash accountability.