CSA Absolute Measure Scores are Coming Back
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is making the final touches to republish online the absolute performance measure scores of a motor carrier within each BASIC by early March. These absolute performance measures will only further generate confusion in the marketplace when hiring a motor carrier and will give the trial bar another arrow in its quiver to seek judgment against a 3PL for negligent selection.
The performance measure weighs a carrier’s violations and crashes by time and severity. This measure only considers a carrier’s individual performance on a scale of 0- 100, with 0 indicating the best performance. Although this is bad news for the 3PL industry, it is not illegal under the FAST Act signed into law in December of 2015. However, it does seem to be in firm contradiction to Congressional intent. The executive and legislative branches of the federal government were clear in their message within the FAST Act, that the CSA initiative is a flawed and failed product that needs to go back to the drawing board and be reworked comprehensively.
The FAST Act or P.L. 114-94, states that “absolute measures” shall remain available to the public while the FAST Act promulgated study and corrective action is undertaken. Even though they were not required to be taken down, the absolute measures were taken down from public view by the Agency following the FAST Act becoming law, likely to clear up the way the data is presented in order to better comply with the law.
It has been and will remain TIA’s position that the safety rating is the sole determination of whether or not a carrier is safe to operate or not and that all CSA data and scores should be removed from public view in their entirety.
