Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) changes- Are you and your clients able to keep up?

CSA continues to confound all stakeholders involved in the supply chain. There appears to be a change a month. The truth is CSA is unfair. While this is a purely conjectural statement, it should be noted that CSA is attempting to raise the bar on truck road safety- and that is a good thing. The challenge is that its strategy to raise the bar is to establish a better measurement system for looking at roadside inspection data and driver experiences. The reason why it is unfair is that so many truckers are "not rated" and so it penalizes those truckers who are rated- who might be actually worse than those that are not rated. Until ALL carriers are rated we will never know. The other challenge is that the only way a carrier can clean up his score is to get a clean inspection- so they have to try and get inspected when nothing is wrong. Does not seem to make sense, does it? And to add insult to injury, they keep changing things. I have to look at that as good since the system needs improvement. What people need to stop doing is saying it is irrelevant and any carrier that is approved to operate by DOT is viewed as safe. I can tell you plaintiff's lawyers, trial courts, and the insurance industry- other ancillary stakeholders in the supply chain do not view it that way at all. An insurance underwriter, rightly or wrongly, has established their own benchmarks that they feel their defense attorneys can successfully defend. So keep your eye on CSA, and look at who is doing what. So what changed this time? Our friends at the Central Analysis Bureau said there were the following changes to CSA this past month. They are: 1)The Cargo-Related BASIC is now aligned with the Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance BASIC 2)The Vehicle Maintenance BASIC has been strengthened by including cargo and load securement violations that were previously in the Cargo-Related BASIC 3)CSA now counts intermodal equipment violations found during drivers’ pre-trip inspections 4)CSA is now trying to align speeding violations to be consistent with current speedometer regulations that require speedometers to be accurate within 5 mph 5)The Fatigued Driving BASIC is no more. The name has been changed to the Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance BASIC to more accurately reflect violations contained within the BASIC 6)CSA is now aligning the severity weight of paper and electronic logbook violations equally on the SMS for consistency purposes. The change applies to the prior 24 months of data used by the SMS and all SMS data moving forward. Keep your eyes open for CSA changes so you can help your clients. We will be looking at for changes as well. Some folks say change is good. Let's hope so.

Fiscal Cliff Averted for Trucking?

Sorry to be out of touch for a while. My friends at CAB got some very interesting information from GE Capital: GE Capital’s sixth market survey of chief financial officers of 500 U.S. middle-market companies reports that 79% of transportation CFOs expect to increase staff in the next 12 months. Trucking CFO's saw the largest increase in credit availability across all industries - a 35 percent increase and up 12 points from the previous survey. Transportation CFO's also indicate that 67% will increase equipment purchases. The greatest business opportunities are expected to focus on increasing average revenue-per-loaded-mile and increasing tonnage volume from existing customers. So that means trucking insurance carriers and their agents should be the beneficiaries. It would also seem to state that whatever driver shortage issues are out there, the CFO's of trucking companies feel they will avert the problem or simply be giving existing drivers better equipment. Sounds all good...

More Brokerage in Trucking

The Central Analysis Bureau obtained a report from Transport Capital Partners that the use of brokers by truckers as a way to solicit freight is on the increase. Approximately 33% of motor carriers used freight brokers in February, up from 11% at the same time last year. What is really interesting is that 34% of large carriers with at least $25 million in annual revenue used brokers compared to 28% of smaller carriers. It used to be construed that truckers who used truck brokers were getting paid less, and more involved in irregular route business- thus creating a worse insurance risk. That now is simply not the case. Truck Brokers are here to stay.....