New Report Recommends Improvements to CSA Scoring System
A congressionally mandated study of way CSA scores are determined recommends improvements, ranging from better collection of data on things such as driver compensation and vehicle miles traveled by state, to replacing the system with a method using “item response theory,” also known as latent trait theory.
The Safety Measurement System is used to identify commercial motor vehicle carriers at high risk for future crashes. It’s the heart of FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability enforcement regime, known as CSA. The review of SMS was written into the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act of 2015.
The resulting study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended that over the next two years, FMCSA should develop a “more statistically principled approach” for the task, based on an item response theory (IRT) model. Also known as latent trait theory, it’s an approach that has been used for policy decisions in other areas such as hospital rankings, according to the panel.
FMCSA uses information collected primarily during roadside inspections to identify motor carriers that are operating unsafely and therefore theoretically at higher risk for future crashes. These carriers are subject to interventions from FMCSA, such as warning letters and investigation.
Since it rolled out in 2010, the report noted that the system has been criticized for, among other things:
• Using highly variable assessments
• Not accounting for crashes where the motor carrier is not at fault
• Including carriers that have very different tasks in the same peer groups
• Using measures that are sensitive to effects from one or more individual states
• Using measures that are not predictive of a carrier’s future crash frequency
• Using measures that are not reflective of a carrier’s efforts to improve its safety performance over time.
The National Academies panel reported, “We have found, for the most part, that the current SMS implementation …Read the rest of this story
