Personal Injury Law

FMCSA Steps Up Oversight of Trucking Industry to Reduce Fatalities and Injuries

By Jeffrey Lowe

As a Missouri semi truck accident attorney, I've been following the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's efforts to improve its oversight of the trucking industry and reduce fatalities and injuries on the highways. For the last 30 months, a field test has been in place here in Missouri, as well as in several other states, to see how the FMCSA's new Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 program will affect truckers in real life. The field test revealed that under the new program, truckers will be interacting a lot more frequently with the FMCSA than they have in the past. This is good news for all motorists, since it may decrease the chances that they will be involved in deadly crashes with large trucks.

Comprehensive Safety Analysis (CSA) 2010 will replace the current SafeStat compliance review system later this year. The FMCSA found that there wasn?t enough personnel to conduct compliance reviews of motor carriers or drivers under the SafeStat program frequently enough to catch violators before their violations become serious enough to result in crashes on the highway. CSA 2010 uses different ways to rate and review carriers and will focus more on drivers, since the Large Truck Crash Causation Study indicated that more attention needed to be paid to drivers. CSA 2010 field tests measured the efficiency and effectiveness of the new safety management system and interventions of CSA 2010. Interventions range from warning letters to comprehensive on-site investigations. According to The Trucker, CSA 2010 resulted in decidedly more interventions than SafeStat, with warning letters more than quadrupling from an estimated 940 under SafeStat to 4232 under CSA 2010.

St. Louis semi trailer crash lawyers like me know that any accident involving a tractor-trailer and a car or motorcycle is likely to result in serious injuries or death for the occupants of the smaller vehicle. This is why I wholeheartedly welcome any improvement in highway safety for large trucks. CSA 2010 might be able to stop exhausted, unhealthy or unqualified drivers who shouldn't be driving from continuing to pilot enormous, heavy trucks on highways shared with lightweight passenger cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of truck drivers like this on the roads -- with revoked or suspended drivers licenses, or distracted by cell phones or misplaced maps. It might also be able to lower the incidence of accidents caused by defective or poorly maintained vehicles, like trucks with loose wheels that fly off and hurt or kill people in other vehicles.

Full post as published by Trucking Accident Attorney Blog on July 09, 2010 (boomark / email).