18 DC VELOCITY MARCH 2014 www.dcvelocity.com
newsworthy
To its critics, Compliance, Safety, and Accountability
2010 (CSA 2010), the Federal Motor Carrier Safety
Administration’s (FMCSA) ambitious effort to remove
unsafe drivers from the roads, has skated on thin ice
throughout its four-year life. In the wake of a federal government study released in early February raising concerns
about the program’s methodology, the ice may be thinning
some more.
On Feb. 3, the Government Accountability Office (GAO),
the investigative arm of Congress, issued a 111-page report
analyzing the program’s effectiveness in measuring the
safety fitness of the more than 500,000 truckers operating
on U.S. roads each year. On one level, the report gave
a thumbs-up to the program and a controversial system called “SMS” (Safety Measurement System). SMS is
designed to identify high-risk truckers by gathering carrier
performance data from accident investigations or roadside
inspections and then grading the carriers by calculating
violation rates for those analyzed and comparing them with
similar carriers over a matrix of seven categories.
According to the GAO report, SMS has improved public
safety by broadening the number of potentially high-risk
truckers subject to the agency’s “intervention.” This often
involves the issuance of warning letters but can also take the
form of unannounced inspections of a carrier’s facilities. In
a period of five fiscal years ending with fiscal 2012, FMCSA
more than doubled its number of annual interventions,
GAO noted.
However, the report said the flaws in the system’s methodology make it difficult for FMCSA to reliably assess the
safety risks of most carriers. GAO said that in order for SMS
to effectively identify carriers most likely to be involved in
accidents, the violations that the agency uses to calculate
SMS scores should have a “strong predictive relationship”
with crashes. But the federal regulations used to compute
SMS scores are not violated often enough to strongly
associate them with the crash risk of individual carriers,
according to GAO.
The report also found that most truckers lack sufficient
safety data to ensure that their performance can be reliably
compared with other carriers’. About 95 percent of the
nation’s fleets operate fewer than 20 vehicles, and FMCSA
The report urged FMCSA to revise its SMS
methodology to better reflect the limitations it
has in gathering safety information and for using
it to compare carrier performance. Those limitations should also be taken into account when
FMCSA determines a carrier’s fitness to operate,
the report said. GAO said the Department of
Transportation, the FMCSA’s umbrella agency,
agreed to consider the recommendations.
The GAO report was requested by the House
Transportation & Infrastructure Committee.
Failing to take any steps in response to the
findings would be tantamount to FMCSA, in
the words of an individual close to the issue,
“thumbing its nose” at the committee.
GRIST FOR RULEMAKING
FMCSA plans to use CSA data when it opens a
safety fitness rulemaking scheduled for later in
2014. In addition, it publishes the SMS scores
on its website. Neither the use of CSA in a
Will report send FMCSA back to the CSA drawing board?
UTi Worldwide, a global supply chain services and solutions company, has opened a new logistics facility in Romulus, Mich. The
company will use the facility to handle warehousing operations
on behalf of its contract logistics clients as well as for air, ocean,
and ground freight forwarding services. … Flagler Global Logistics
has leased Building 1 at its new South Florida Logistics Center
located adjacent to Miami International
Airport, along with more than 600,000
square feet of industrial space at its Flagler
Station business park. … Third-party logistics service provider Kane Is Able Inc. has
opened a 211,000-square-foot distribution
center in Rialto, Calif., located in the Inland
Empire, and a 60,000-square-foot distribution center in Brownstown, Mich., 21 miles
south of downtown Detroit. … Construction is under way on a
2. 7 million-cubic-foot expansion of Henningsen Cold Storage’s
Portland, Ore., operation. … W.J. Beitler Co. and Beitler Trucking
Inc. have added 120,000 square feet of rail-served warehouse space
to their facility in the Thornburg Industrial Park in Crafton, Pa. …
Service Cold Storage and Tippmann Group have broken ground
on a new cold storage warehouse facility in Stevens Point, Wis.
The 157,000-square-foot facility will serve as a frozen distribution
warehouse for the food industry.
ground breakers
KANE IS ABLE INC.
