Depending on who you talk to, CSA 2010 is either just another pain in the neck coming at the worst possible time because of the recession or CSA 2010 is one of the biggest and best changes to be foisted on trucking in decades and it will make the industry safer and more profitable for all law-abiding carriers and drivers.

But one thing everybody agrees on is that CSA 2010 will affect anybody running in the U.S. And some in the industry think it's only a matter of time before CSA 2010 crosses the border and invades the Canadian trucking scene, too.

CSA incidentally, stands for Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010, and in case you hadn't heard, it's already on stream as a pilot project in a few states and in July, rollout starts in earnest. 

CSA 2010 is an initiative of the American Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and has been in the works for more than a decade. The American trucking industry had been lobbying for a retrofit of the Department of Transport's (DOT) fitness, safety and rating systems and this is the result.

In short, CSA 2010 employs comprehensive data collected at roadside inspections. That data is reviewed every 30 days to assess every carrier's safety performance.

That information will then be used to grade the carriers and if their grades start to flag, the carriers get put on notice by the DOT; if they don't shore up their operations as instructed, the DOT will conduct an audit. The audit will be "surgical" and target those problems identified at roadside, but if things worsen instead of improve, fines, operating restrictions or worse will ensue.

What's more, as Jeff Davis the vice president and safety director for the Dayton, Ohio,-based Jet-Express Inc., told an audience in Toronto recently, the more infractions your drivers collect at roadside, the more frequently they will be inspected. And the more inspections you get, the more likely DOT inspectors will find infractions.

Davis calls it the "vicious cycle of non-compliance."

There are, he says, about 3,580 different truck violations, ranging from a broken turn signal or misaligned trailer tape to speeding, collisions, inaccurate logs or driving with malfunctioning brakes.

CSA 2010 is a tougher standard, but at
least it will give carriers more specific targets.

Under CSA 2010, each of those has a severity weighting and they will be used to determine the carrier's rating, which is called an Inspection Selection System Number (ISSD).

"Your ISSD number is the most important number you'll know," Davis says.

And that number determines how many times your trucks will be checked. When the DOT stops your truck and enters your identification number and learns your ISSD, if it's in the one-to-49 range -- you get a green light. If it's between 50 and 74, you get a yellow light and according to Davis, "if it's over 75, the inspector's already on alert because he's got a criminal coming at him."

Frank Screen is a veteran safety-and-compliance consultant with trucking clients all across Southern Ontario. He has tracked CAS 2010 from its inception.

"At first, I thought it was just going to be another way of putting carriers under the gun," he says.

"But what I'm seeing now is that it's going to be putting the drivers under the gun and you're going to be evaluated on a monthly basis. So maybe it's going to be a little fairer as long as the enforcement people do the things they're supposed to do."

Jet-Express's Davis put it this way: "literally the safety fitness rating of a motor carrier is held in the hands of the driver wrapped around the steering wheel. Safety fitness determinations in the future will be performance based."

Brian Taylor runs Liberty Linehaul out of Ayr, Ont., as well as Liberty Linehaul West out of Montebello, Calif.

He's among the carriers who welcome CSA 2010 but, he says, that's because he already prides himself on running compliant. Advocates of the new system all agree that for good carriers, CSA 2010 will be a boon; but bad carriers will despise it.

"This is awesome for us but we try to do everything we can to get it right anyway," Taylor says. "We track all our convictions and tickets and we pay attention to that and we discipline accordingly."

Taylor says the third-party tracking of driver violations as planned by CSA 2010 will give all carriers a "scorecard" that will help keep drivers in compliance. Also, he says, insurance companies will have an easier time getting information on carriers, simply by logging into the new "Compass" website that the FMCSA is operating in conjunction with CSA 2010.

"It's going to revolutionize a little how we look at drivers," Taylor says. "Compass," adds Jet-Express' Davis, "is putting SafeStat out to pasture."

Rick Geller is the director of Safety & Signature Services for Markel, the trucking insurance giant. He says insurance companies are welcoming CSA 2010, but not for the reasons one might assume.

"This [CSA 2010] is monitoring high-risk behavior on both the drivers' and the carriers' part. It should make the highways safer for everyone."

Advocates CSA 2010 all agree it's good for
good carriers, but bad carriers will despise it.

The regular update of carriers' ISSDs along with the specific information about why the ISSD score was earned will give carriers very clear ideas about what parts of their organization need shoring up.

"It's like, if you will, going out to an archery range. Imagine how tough it would be to determine your success if you didn't have targets. Well CSA 2010 will give carriers very specific targets."

The monthly scorecards will remind not only drivers but everybody else including maintenance, dispatch and accounting people who play a role in keeping the company compliant.

Geller: "A lot of dispatch systems work with the first-in, first-out system and that effectively encourages drivers to race with each other.

"Say there are two drivers in Thunder Bay heading to Winnipeg. They know that there's a back haul in Winnipeg waiting for the first guy to get there. Before they leave Thunder Bay, Driver A gets a good night's sleep, does a thorough pre-trip and follows the speed limit along that part of the Trans-Canada, right through to Winnipeg. Driver B sleeps in a bit, does a quick, not so thorough pre-trip and gets a later start but barrels along at one-oh-five, one-ten.

"Sure he'll get the return load because the system is first in first out. That doesn't exactly encourage safe driving, does it?"

Last month, at a "Driving for Profit" seminar in Mississauga, Jeff Davis opened his CSA 2010 presentation by commending Canadian carriers, saying that the Canadian trucks he sees in the States seem to be generally in good operating condition.

Andy Malion is chairman and founder of Spectra Inc., which specializes in truck safety and produces the popular Brake Safe, a visual brake stroke indicator. He was at Davis's seminar and afterwards echoed the view that CSA 2010 is a huge change.

"Not too many people are aware that the DOT started keeping scores a year and a half ago."

"One of the big differences is that a drivers' safety record will affect the carriers' record."

Furthermore, Malion adds, there's a possibility that come July 1, 2010, thousands of drivers and carriers in the States will be faced with their scores and face fines, audits or even loss of their licences. Also, some critics of the proposed changes have determined that the weighting system the DOT has established is somewhat subjective.

The weight of some violations is based statistically on the relationship between the violation and the likelihood of a crash while others were determined more by anecdotal and subjective analysis.

To whit: A driver with a moving violation in one state is required to notify his home state, in writing, that he had the violation. If he didn't inform his home state, CSA 2010 assigns that infraction with a six on the scale of one-to-10, with 10 meaning most likely to be associated with crash risk. It's difficult to see a link between the failure of a driver to write a letter and the likelihood of having a crash.

And while the old system under-valued many infractions in terms of how serious they were because it only counted OOS violations, CSA 2010 might be found guilty of over-stating the case. As the rules now stand, CSA 2010 assigns weight to all crashes, even if the carrier and/or driver were not legally responsible for the event. (The DOT has indicated that this will be re-assessed.)

However, as safety consultant Screen suggests, CSA 2010 will make the industry more efficient and the good guys will get better; the bad guys will be forced to shore up or close down.

"Everything's laid out for you so you know you're not going to get a phone call saying 'we're coming to visit next Wednesday."

Screen, who at 72 has been in trucking for longer than most, agrees that CSA 2010 is a radical change for the industry and sums it up thusly, "it's going to be a better system."