The Mid-America Trucking Show earlier this month features a number of sessions organized by The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, designed to explain the new compliance program, the Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 Initiative. Under the new initiative:

1) A driver’s driving record will now include collisions as well as any issues with roadside inspections. A record will go back three years and violations will be weighted on how recent they were and on their risk of leading to an accident. A driver’s driving record will be made available through the Pre-Employment Screening Program. Drivers will be able to improve their records with any clean inspections. If a driver is fired due to too many violations or if a driver leaves a carrier, the driver’s driving points will stay with the carrier. This means that carriers will be directly responsible for the driving records of their drivers and will not be able to simply get rid of bad drivers. Details of the point program and system are available through csa2010.fmcsa.gov.

2) The Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 Initiative will likely remove 200,000 truck drivers from roads or up to 320, 000. Most of these drivers will be removed because the new points system and the method of taking a closer look at driving records will reveal unsafe driving records and these drivers will be considered unemployable. The Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 Initiative will make criteria for hiring quite high for carriers and carriers will be more responsible for their driver’s records. As a result, drivers with poor records will likely not be hired. The CSA, however, notes that this will actually increase competition for good drivers, so that good truck drivers will likely be able to enjoy better benefits and pay as carriers become more committed to hiring a smaller pool of good drivers.

3) Driver’s records and carrier’s records will be more closely linked. Carriers who has a poor score with the Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 Initiative will be targeted for inspection more and that poor score will affect a driver’s own record.
4) There will be more inspections. Currently, only about 2% of carriers get safety audits and the Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 Initiative aims to change that quickly. The program aims to audit the majority of carriers quickly, targeting those with the poorest records especially. The aim of the inspections is to institute changes that will make roads safer. Inspectors will also be given more information prior to each inspection, so that each inspection takes less time. The CSA hopes that the inspections will catch and fix more safety violations, thus preventing truck accidents and their resulting brain injuries, fatalities, spinal cord injuries, and other injuries.