Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Why shippers should not use and should also oppose the CSA/SMS methodology

By: Tom Sanderson
The FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System (SMS) scores were first made public in December 2010. Now that we have a full year’s worth of data, the flaws in the system are becoming obvious. The SMS data is incomplete, it grossly exaggerates the number and percentage of carriers that may have safety issues, and worst of all the SMS scores have no correlation with safety as measured by accidents per million miles. See Full Article on the following page.
Why Shippers Should Not Use And Should also oppose the CSA/SMS Methodology

Monday, January 9, 2012

The Safety Measurement System: A Flawed Assessment of Motor Carrier Conduct

Highway fatalities involving trucks are at an all-time low. A mass of new regulations are not needed, particularly when competition, efficiency, and jobs are at stake. Yet the broker and shipper community has been slow to realize the effect of SMS methodology.

http://www.inboundlogistics.com/cms/article/the-safety-measurement-system-a-flawed-assessment-of-motor-carrier-conduct/

Friday, January 6, 2012

Key safety panel questions validity of CSA/SMS scores as crash predictor

Posted By: Tom Sanderson

The Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee is recommending that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) collect more data to ensure that the Safety Measurement System (SMS) is based on science and not on the intuition or opinion of experts. Read more about this in Transport Topics. The committee reported that it did not have sufficient data to conclude that CSA/SMS scores are related to crash probability. Committee member Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for the ATA said “Really, they reflect sort of guesses at the relationship between violations and crashes in terms of severity. We really need to look at the data that shows a causal relationship.”

We know from the fine work done by Wells Fargo that there is no relationship between SMS scores and accidents per million miles.

Why CSA Is Not Fit For Shippers and Brokers To Use

Please see the attached edited transcription of a December 20, 2011 conference call hosted by Stifel Nicolaus, which featured Tom Sanderson, CEO of Transplace, a leading provider of transportation management services, and Henry Seaton, Esquire, partner in the Seaton & Husk law firm and member of the Association for Transportation Law, Logistics, and Policy.

Why CSA is Not Fit for Shippers and Brokers to Use - Conference Call Transcript 1.5.12