Motor Carrier Safety: The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Has Developed a Reasonable Framework for Managing and Testing Its Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 Initiative

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "About 5,500 people die each year as a result of crashes involving large commercial trucks or buses, and about 160,000 more are injured. While the fatality rate for these crashes has generally decreased over the last 20 years, the decline has leveled off in the most recent years. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) within the U.S. Department of Transportation shoulders the primary federal responsibility for reducing these crashes, fatalities, and injuries and recognizes the need to make improvements if it is to achieve further substantial safety advancements. A key FMCSA effort to improve motor carrier safety is implementing the agency's Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 (CSA 2010) initiative. Through CSA 2010, FMCSA expects to reduce motor carrier crashes, fatalities, and injuries by using better ways to identify unsafe carriers and drivers; assessing a larger portion of the motor carrier industry and holding carriers and drivers accountable for sustained performance by regularly determining their safety fitness; and expanding the range of interventions to be used with carriers and drivers that fail to comply with safety requirements. Congress asked us to conduct a broad assessment of FMCSA's progress in planning and implementing CSA 2010. Because much of the detailed work to develop and implement CSA 2010 remains to be done, our work has focused on how FMCSA has managed its initiative, rather than assessing safety benefits that might arise from it. Specifically, we reviewed: (1) how FMCSA sees CSA 2010 increasing safety, (2) whether FMCSA's overall framework for planning and implementing CSA 2010 is reasonable, and (3) the extent to which the operational test of the CSA 2010 model will inform FMCSA of its ability to fully implement the initiative in 2010.