With decades of experience navigating the complexities of logistics and supply chain management, Rohit Laila has witnessed the evolution of motor carrier safety regulation firsthand. His passion for technology and innovation gives him a unique and critical perspective on the systems that govern how risk is measured on our highways. He joins us to dissect the industry’s most polarizing safety tool and advocate for a more transparent, data-driven future.
This conversation delves into the deep-seated flaws within the FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program, exploring the dangerous disconnect it fosters between carriers and the shippers who rely on their services. We’ll uncover how the current system, which leans heavily on subjective roadside inspections, is vulnerable to manipulation and fraud. The discussion will also highlight the critical impact of removing public crash data from the equation and chart a course toward a more reliable system that prioritizes objective outcomes over procedural compliance, ultimately aiming to enhance safety for everyone on the road.
The article highlights a major trust gap, describing CSA scores as a “rant-inducer” for carriers but “objective truth” for shippers. Based on your experience, what specific scenarios cause this divide, and how does the lack of public crash data make this polarization worse?
You see this divide play out every single day. A carrier’s safety director might get a call about a driver who was pulled over for a Level 1 inspection and cited for a burned-out clearance light. To them, it’s a minor, frustrating issue—the bulb was working that morning. But because of the CSA’s severity weighting and time factor, that single violation can spike their Vehicle Maintenance percentile. Then, a shipper’s risk manager, who has never set foot in a truck, sees that percentile jump into the red on their third-party monitoring dashboard. They don’t see a burned-out bulb; they see a number that their corporate policy says is unacceptable, and that carrier is immediately put on a “do not use” list. The carrier is indignant because they feel judged on a triviality, while the shipper believes they’ve dodged a bullet based on “objective” data. Now, since the public Crash Indicator was removed, this problem is magnified tenfold. Before, you could at least balance a poor inspection score against a clean crash history. Now, that inspection data is all the shipper sees, making that single, often random, event the entire story.
You mentioned the rise of black-market ELDs and fraudulent CDLs. Can you provide a step-by-step example of how a carrier with a poor safety culture uses these schemes to maintain a clean CSA score, effectively hiding their risk from brokers who rely on that data?
It’s a disturbingly simple and effective process for a bad actor. Let’s imagine a carrier that consistently pressures its drivers to exceed their legal hours-of-service to make delivery windows. Instead of using a legitimate, registered electronic logging device, the owner pays a shady provider as little as $50 a week for a “ghost log” app. Now, their driver can run 14 or 15 hours, but when they see an inspection station ahead, they can tap a few buttons on their phone to make their logbook look perfectly legal—showing a full 10-hour break they never took. When the inspector checks the ELD, it shows a pristine record. So, this carrier’s HOS BASIC score remains exceptionally low. Meanwhile, another carrier that insists on by-the-book logging gets dinged for legitimate fatigue violations, and their score climbs. A broker, looking at the CSA data, sees the fraudulent carrier as a top performer and the honest carrier as a risk. They are unwittingly rewarding the cheaters and punishing those who follow the rules, all because the data they rely on is being expertly faked at the source.
Since the public Crash Indicator was removed in 2022, the piece suggests shippers download the MCMIS file themselves. For a risk manager, what does that process look like? Please detail the steps for turning that raw data into a useful, normalized metric for carrier evaluation.
For a diligent risk manager, this has become a necessary, if cumbersome, task. First, they have to navigate to the FMCSA’s data portal and find the Motor Carrier Management Information System, or MCMIS, crash file. It’s a massive dataset that gets updated monthly. They would download it and then begin the real work of filtering. You’d start by isolating all crashes within the last 24 months for the carriers you’re vetting. The raw file gives you the USDOT number, date, location, and whether there were fatalities, injuries, or tow-aways. But just seeing that a large national carrier had 50 crashes and a small regional one had two is useless without context. The critical step is normalization. You have to take that raw crash count and divide it by the carrier’s total number of power units or, even better, their vehicle miles traveled. This creates a true rate, like “crashes per 100 trucks.” Only then can you make a fair, apples-to-apples comparison. It’s extra work, but it’s the only way to get back the objective outcome data that was taken away.
The FMCSA already runs a Crash Preventability Determination Program. How could the agency leverage this existing system to create a public “preventable crash rate,” and what specific impact would this single metric have on the daily carrier-vetting process for a typical freight brokerage?
This is the most frustrating part—the solution is sitting right there, already in use. The FMCSA has a system where a carrier can submit evidence, like dashcam video or a police report, to prove a crash wasn’t their fault. Think of being rear-ended at a red light or a car crossing the median into their lane. The agency reviews this and, if they agree, removes that crash from the carrier’s internal score. All they need to do is take this one step further. Instead of just noting which crashes aren’t preventable, they should tally the ones that are and publish that as a simple, public rate. For a freight broker, the impact would be revolutionary. Their vetting process would be transformed overnight. Instead of trying to interpret seven different, easily gamed BASIC percentiles, they would have one powerful, intuitive number: the preventable crash rate. It would immediately cut through the noise and allow them to see, at a glance, which carriers are truly high-risk partners, regardless of how well they perform during a 15-minute roadside inspection.
The commentary contrasts artificial roadside inspections with objective crash outcomes. Can you share an anecdote or a metric that illustrates how a carrier could have a perfect score in a category like Vehicle Maintenance but still be a high-risk partner due to preventable accidents?
I’ve seen this exact scenario play out. There was a carrier we were evaluating whose scores were, on the surface, spectacular. Their Vehicle Maintenance BASIC was in the single digits, meaning they were in the top percentile of their peers. Every time one of their trucks got pulled in for an inspection, it passed with flying colors. But their reputation among drivers was terrible, and something felt off. Because we had access to older data and did some digging into public records, we uncovered a disturbing pattern: three major accidents in two years, all involving one of their trucks rolling over on a clear, dry night. The trucks themselves were mechanically sound, which is why their inspection scores were so good. The problem wasn’t the equipment; it was the operational culture of pushing drivers to the brink of exhaustion. The CSA scores, based on those artificial inspections, told a story of a safe, compliant carrier. The objective crash outcomes, however, painted a picture of a company that was a ticking time bomb on the highway. That’s the dangerous gap we’re dealing with—the system is measuring the wrong thing.
What is your forecast for carrier safety and data transparency?
My forecast is one of cautious optimism, driven by necessity. With issues like broker liability now reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, the pressure on shippers and brokers to prove they are performing adequate due diligence is immense. They can no longer afford to rely on a flawed, easily manipulated scorecard. I believe this legal pressure will force the industry to demand better from the FMCSA. They will have to provide tools that reflect actual on-the-road safety outcomes, not just inspection-day performance. The data exists in the MCMIS file, and the methodology exists in the Crash Preventability program. Connecting the two to create a public, transparent, and objective preventable crash rate is the logical and necessary next step. It won’t happen overnight, but I believe the market will ultimately compel regulators to make this change, because pretending a system built on random inspections is sufficient is no longer a tenable position.
