CSA BASIC scores have no relationship to carrier accident frequency   

Wells Fargo Senior Analyst Anthony Gallo published his second excellent analysis of CSA proving with the FMCSA’s own data that there is little or no correlation between CSA BASIC scores and motor carrier accidents. You can contract me or contact Anthony directly at anthony.gallo@wellsfargo.com for the full document, but I want to highlight a couple of key points. Wells Fargo analyzed data for 200 large carriers comparing accidents per million miles and accidents per power unit to 3 key BASIC scores. Accidents may not be the best measure of a carrier’s safety since there is no indication of who was at fault in the accident or the severity of the accident, but one would still expect that carriers with few accidents are generally very safety conscious in their driver and equipment management strategies.

The analysis shows little or no correlation between the CSA BASIC scores for Unsafe Driving, Fatigued Driving, and Driver Fitness and accidents per million miles or accidents per power unit. Everyone wants to see continued reductions in truck-related accidents, and I am sure nobody is going to speak out in favor of “unsafe drivers” or “fatigued drivers”. It appears though, that the key CSA measures that would indicate a carrier should be a candidate for further scrutiny bear no relationship to the actual safety performance of those carriers. This is one of numerous reasons that shippers and brokers should not be using CSA data to create their own carrier credentialing methodologies.

The first graph shows the low correlation between the Unsafe Driving BASIC and accidents per million miles.

The Unsafe Driving BASIC r-squared of .042 means that the score accounts for 4.2% of the variance in the accidents per million miles. In plain English, the score bears no relationship to accident history. Carriers with very high (bad) Unsafe Driving scores may have very low accident rates or may have higher accident rates. Similarly, carriers with very low (good)Unsafe Driving scores may have high or low accident rates.

The second graph shows the correlation between Fatigued Driving and accidents per million miles. There is even less correlation for this basic. There is virtually no relationship between the BASIC score and accidents per million miles.

Finally, the graph for Driver Fitness, while showing a slightly better correlation, has an r-squared of .055, indicating again that there is almost no relationship between the BASIC score and accident history.

If you are a shipper or broker and are using CSA scores to decide which carriers to use, you should stop immediately. You are doing nothing to improve safety on our highways. You are harming small businesses in our country by denying freight to carriers that are authorized by the federal government to operate in interstate trucking. You are harming your own bottom line by failing to use carriers that provide the right combination of rates and service to meet your needs. You are harming our industry by potentially putting out of business perfectly good carriers at a time when we are on the precipice of a significant capacity shortage.