Safety Strategy * USA - FMCSA's Ferro Defines One

Sum of related programs, rulemakings is seismic shift for trucking

Washington,DC,USA -The Journal of Commerce Online, by William B. Cassidy -Feb 22, 2011: -- The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is pursuing a three-pronged strategy to truck safety as it tries to drive truck accident fatalities lower...  The three parts of that strategy are the Compliance, Safety and Accountability or CSA program, truck driver hours of service reform, and electronic logging...  Together, they add up to the biggest change in the truck safety arena in decades...  CSA, the proposed HOS rule and a proposal that would require truckers to use electronic onboard recorders are the interlocking pieces of FMCSA's overall safety strategy, which focuses squarely on driver behavior, she said...  The HOS rules, however many hours they finally include, will be a yardstick, while the EOBR mandate and CSA will monitor, substantiate and enforce compliance...  Although fatalities in crashes involving large trucks dropped 36 percent from 2005 to 2009, the FMCSA's mandate is to reduce those fatalities even further, she said...