The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is the part of the Department of Transportation that regulates the trucking industry. Perhaps most importantly, the FMCSA regulates the safety performance for trucking companies in order to try to keep the highways free of truck accidents and protect other motorists on the highways from injury. The FMCSA’s safety initiative is called Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) and aims to improve commercial vehicle safety to reduce accidents. The CSA tries to stay on top of new developments in the truck industry in order to adapt safety guidelines and evaluations accordingly. Most importantly, the CSA evaluations allow the FMCSA to identify unsafe trucking companies and know when it is necessary to monitor safety problems and work to ensure the unsafe practices do not continue. If you are injured because of unsafe trucking practices, you should contact a Fayette County truck accident lawyer to help you recover for your losses.
In order to measure safety of truck companies, the CSA looks at seven different categories, referred to as the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC). The BASICs are:
- Hours of service noncompliance
- Fitness of truck drivers
- Driver use of controlled substances or alcohol
- Unsafe, careless, or reckless driving behaviors
- Improper vehicle maintenance
- Histories or patterns of frequent or severe truck crashes
- Unsafe handling of hazardous materials
These BASICs are the most common causes of truck accidents, injuries, and fatalities. The CSA looks to each trucking company’s number of accidents due to BASICs, the severity of those accidents, and how recent those accidents occurred. Based on this information, truck companies are grouped with other companies that have similar performances and scored within that peer group.
BASIC measurements and the CSA are vital to try to keep the trucking industry safe and to reduce the number of accidents and injuries that occur. If you have been injured in an accident, an unsafe trucking company might be at fault. You should contact a truck accident attorney at Shane Smith Law for help with a possible case. Call (980) 246-2656 as soon as possible.