Trucking Industry Blog

Next year FMCSA is replacing SAFESTAT with CSA 2010 (Comprehensive Safety Analysis – 2010). Have you heard about this? If not, you need to educate yourself now. This is scheduled to take effect the middle of next year and when it does, your safety information for the last 24 months will be used to determine your CSA scores. The inspections and violations that are happening now, will determine your CSA rating when it takes effect next year. You need to be familiar with the new CSA program, in order to be proactive and start now making changes needed to improve your CSA rating in the future. The FMCSA website for this information is here.

FMCSA will be gathering much more information for the CSA program than they are currently gathering for the SAFESTAT program. All inspections (roadside, offsite, and onsite), all violations, and all crashes will be included in the new CSA information gathering process. SAFESTAT currently has four main categories that it monitors. The new CSA is monitoring seven categories that they called BASIC (Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Category). These seven BASIC categories are:

• Unsafe driving
• Fatigue (hours-of-service)
• Driver fitness
• Controlled substances and alcohol
• Vehicle maintenance
• Improper loading and cargo securement
• Crash history

Reference

Any incidents, within these seven BASIC categories that you had in the last 24 months, will be included in your CSA rating. The most current incidents are weighted and affect the rating more than older incidents. Therefore, if you take steps now to clean up any safety issues, your safety rating will be much lower when CSA takes effect next year.

Not only is FMCSA including more information in the ratings, they have also proposed more comprehensive punitive actions if a carriers CSA rating is too high, up to and including revocation of their authority. Don’t wait until CSA takes effect to make any needed safety changes. It will be too late if your score is too high. Learn the new rules now, make any needed changes, and when CSA takes effect, you will be sitting pretty, ready to "keep on truckin'".

Craig Sorensen
TruckMaster Solution Provider
TruckMaster Your Trucking Company™