NEWS IN BRIEF
cess—would be so lengthy, incorporat- ing crash fault into SMS rankings may be a moot point, the agency says, as SMS rankings only use crashes from the preceding two-year period. The agency’s report also says
incorporating crash accountability into CSA would cost between $3.9 million and $11.1 million each year, depending on how many accidents are reviewed, the appeals brought and the agency’s final process for determining crash weighting.
CONSUMER CONFIDENCE, SPENDING SIGNALS ECONOMIC RECOVERY There are now 3.2 million more
CRASH ACCOUNTABILITY TOO EXPENSIVE AND INEFFICIENT FMCSA SAYS FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety,
Accountability (CSA) system for evalu- ating carrier safety has long been criti- cized by the trucking industry. Trucking points out that CSA does not distin- guish between accidents in which the truck or truck driver is to blame and accidents in which the truck clearly was not at fault. Accidents factor into CSA’s Crash Indicator BASIC, a calculation which ranks carriers based on their pro- pensity for accidents. Following the release of a study in
January, FMCSA claimed that incorpo- rating crash accountability into CSA scores would not improve the DOT’s ability to target for intervention carriers
ARKANSAS TRUCKING REPORT | Issue 1 2015
most at risk for crashes, nor would it be easy to implement or cost-effective. “It is not lost on the trucking
industry that the word ‘Accountability’ is in the title of CSA, yet FMCSA con- tinues to ignore crash accountability,” said American Trucking Associations Executive Vice President Dave Osiecki. “Analysis using all crashes shows
that incorporating crash weighting determinations does not consistently improve the Crash Indicator when the various weighting approaches are applied,” the study concludes. And because the process for deter-
mining crash weighting—receiving accident reports from police, analyzing and making crash fault determination, weighting the crash appropriately and then going through an appeals pro-
Americans earning paychecks than there were 12 months ago. That addi- tional cash tends to boost consumer spending, which drives about 70 percent of economic growth. Americans are feeling better about
the economy. Consumer confidence jumped in January to its highest level in a decade, according to a survey by the University of Michigan. And consum- ers increased their spending during the final three months of last year at the fastest pace in nearly nine years. Companies that benefit most
directly from consumer spending have ramped up hiring since the fall, when gas price savings began to pile up in Americans’ bank accounts. Retailers added 45,900 jobs in January, hotels and restaurants 37,100. Construction companies have been a source of big job gains. They’ve added
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