Technology to regulate blunt force object

   We don’t often think about how technology-driven trucking has become because most motorists—even those with a keen understanding of supply chain—tend to think of trucks motoring down the highway as blunt force objects.
   But modern big rigs are essentially computers with steering wheels. Their routes are planned with sophisticated software, their movements and emissions tracked by sensors, the delivery of their goods confirmed via mobile device applications.
   But all this technology wrapped around trucking also creates the ability to potentially better understand truck safety. There’s a raft of regulations aimed at improving truck safety coming down the pike in the next few years—from the more analog hours of service restrictions to the more digital electronic logging devices and speed limiters.
   Another potentially interesting area to watch is how predictive analytics may impact a carrier’s safety rating with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
   In January, the FMCSA released a paper, Crash Weighting Analysis, which explored the idea that the process for determining a particular carrier’s potential risk for being involved in future crashes didn’t take into account key variables. Chief among those variables is whether the carrier was actually at fault in the crash.
   Just to reiterate, the data the FMCSA currently uses to score carrier safety doesn’t differentiate between accidents caused by the carrier and those in which the carrier was not at fault.
   Carriers have long argued that the FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) system for evaluating carrier safety ignores this crucial issue. CSA, as it currently is structured, penalizes carriers involved in accidents in the previous two years (whether the carrier is at fault or not) by affecting their score. The system essentially assumes carriers involved in any accident are more likely to have future accidents.
   “Numerous times over the past five years, [the American Trucking Associations] has respectfully requested FMCSA to screen out crashes from CSA where it is plainly evident the professional truck driver and motor carrier were not at fault,” ATA Executive Vice President Dave Osiecki told FleetOwner magazine in January. 
   “Instances where a truck is rear-ended by a drunk driver, or hit head-on by a motorist traveling in the wrong direction on the interstate, or…when a truck was struck by a collapsing bridge are clearly not the fault of the professional driver and certainly should not be used to target his or her carrier for potentially intrusive government oversight,” he added.
   As any carrier will gladly tell you, the number of variables at play in an accident are beyond numerous, and most are out of a carrier’s direct control. One speaker at the SMC³’s Connections conference in San Diego in June described a particularly freak incident: an object rolling down a highway embankment that struck a truck passing by.
   Should something like that impact a carrier’s CSA score? Most transportation advocates would say absolutely not.
   The veteran transportation attorney John Bagileo told the conference that the problem, as he sees it, is the FMCSA acts as a sipher for the federal government, rather than as an independent regulatory body, as the old Interstate Commerce Commission did (the ICC was abolished in the mid-1990s).
   Bagileo lamented the FMCSA’s regulations as being driven not by actual improvement in truck safety, but by politics, since the agency is accountable to Congress and the White House.
   Those are charged remarks to be sure, but what’s not up for debate is that the trucking industry is being buried under an incredible amount of paperwork and pressure. Unlike the ocean or air freight industries, the North American trucking market is hugely fragmented (especially on the truckload side). Forcing companies to adhere to ill-conceived regulations stresses the system unduly, especially as shippers face up to the impacts of a worsening driver shortage and resultant tightness in capacity.
   Which brings us back to the issue of predictive analytics and the likelihood of a carrier being involved in a future accident. Is the technology out there to help the FMCSA accurately determine which carrier is more likely to be involved in a crash? Surely yes. Remember, last month we talked about predictive analytics being used to help the airline and gambling industries figure out some pretty complex problems.
   But let’s also recall the size of this particular issue. Hundred of thousands of vehicles of various ages and levels of wear-and-tear. Some equipped with the latest gadgets, others antiquated. Some driven by those with spotless driving records, others with checkered pasts. Some driven primarily in crowded cities, others on lonely highways.
   The sheer number of variables makes it a massive math problem. And this is a math problem with real consequences. CSA scores are public, and carriers are being compared with one another on a 100-point scale.
   Carriers are understandably worried that any predictive tool used to forecast carrier crash rates would be another weapon used to undermine their safety records and jeopardize their businesses.
   The point that many trucking advocates make is that the industry is largely self-regulating when it comes to safety. Most carriers carry more insurance than they are required to and train drivers on a consistent basis. It behooves carriers to focus on the safety of the driver and their equipment as a starting point, not an afterthought, they say.
   Bagileo argued the FMCSA’s attempts to regulate safety just don’t take into account the market realities of the trucking industry and its existing, inherent emphasis on safety—instead, the agency tends to focus on public interest groups that make the most noise.
   Perhaps use of predictive data to better understand what an unsafe carrier is makes sense. But given the trucking industry’s deep mistrust of the FMCSA’s regulatory track record, it seems hard to believe the agency will ever be embraced as the entity to develop and administer that technology.

This column was published in the August 2015 issue of American Shipper.