The trucking industry has depended for years on FMCSA’s CSA Safety Measurement System as its main safety scorecard. But according to FreightWaves, this system is deeply flawed, it’s based mostly on snapshots from roadside inspections, not actual accident outcomes, and is vulnerable to manipulation.

Because of that, many avoidable crashes go unaccounted for, while carriers might appear “safe” simply because they passed inspection on a good day. The removal of the “Crash Indicator” metric from public view made things worse, eliminating the only consistent, outcome-based safety measure that showed real crash history.

it’s time to bring back robust crash-reporting data, and make it publicly available to all stakeholders. The alternative: relying on inspection data that can be gamed and gives a distorted picture of real-world risk.