My article, The New Rules in Trucking Discovery, was published nationally in Trial magazine (February 2011, Volume 47, No. 02). If you are not familiar with the significant regulatory changes that have impacted the trucking industry in late 2010 and early 2011, and thought about how it impacts your cases, you should read it!
CSA (formerly CSA 2010 [which originally stood for Comprehensive Safety Analysis but was changed on Nov 30th to Compliance Safety and Accountability and the 2010 was dropped]) is now live at www.SAFERSYS.org . This will have a significant impact on litigation involving trucks, buses, and other commercial motor vehicles.
FYI, the FMCSA caved to industry pressure so there is now a warning that indicates the data is not a safety fitness determination or a safety rating. The warning pops up when you log into the SaferSys site.
In typical government fashion "CSA 21010" is now "CSA." The 2010 has been dropped , presumably because the program was delayed and pushed back another year.
I have blogged about CSA 2010 before (click here for a general overview) and was looking forward to the new system which, allegedly, will be able to asses more than the 1-2% of trucking companies that under the current system are currently evaluated. Unfortunately the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it was pushing back the start of CSA 2010 until late 2010, with some portions delayed until 2011. The schedule, published in the Federal Register April 9th, can be read in full here.
CSA 2010 was to originally start this summer, but unsafe trucking companies have realized that it will be tougher to circumvent the new rules and have asked for more time. Surprisingly, the FMCSA agreed. The trucking industry continues to try to water down the new regulations to continue "business as normal."
The new schedule calls for a so-called “data preview” to run through Nov. 30, at which time FMCSA will begin issuing warning letters and using CSA 2010 scores to target fleets for compliance reviews and extra roadside enforcement. Full, nationwide implementation of all of CSA 2010's new enforcement tools will not begin until 2011.
The public will not be able to view the Crash Indicator scores in November because of concerns about the quality of the underlying crash data. As I understand the concerns some states don't report all the information that they should, making the crash data LOWER than it should be if all the crashes were reported. While this may make the data imperfect, it can certainly be used to find and get off the road unsafe trucking companies. If the imperfect data shows the companies are bad, the real data would show they are WORSE!
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