Your CSA (compliance, safety, accountability) score can have a huge impact on your fleet operations and expenses. The better you understand your score, the more quickly you can get your fleet’s CSA score where you want it to be to offer maximum benefit.

What Factors Into Your CSA Score?

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) uses data obtained from roadside inspections and crash reports over the last two years to determine your CSA score. That data is organized into the following categories:

1. Unsafe driving. Does your fleet have a history of unsafe driving violations, like speeding, improper lane changes, or even of drivers failing to wear seatbelts?
2. Compliance with hours of service. How well are you keeping up with HOS regulations?
3. The fitness of drivers. Do your drivers have adequate experience, education, and health to operate your vehicles?
4. Violations involving alcohol or controlled substances. Impaired driving violations are costly for your fleet. Create policies that strictly prohibit impaired driving.
5. Vehicle maintenance. How well do you maintain your vehicles and secure your loads?
6. Crash indicators. What is the history of state-reported crashes with your carrier?
7. Compliance concerning hazardous materials. Do you take your responsibilities when transporting hazardous materials seriously?

These numbers are updated once each month to ensure that you’re always operating with the latest scores and so you know where you stand. You can use GPS fleet tracking to assist you in your efforts to improve your CSA score by

• Automatically scheduling routine maintenance
• Setting up alerts when drivers speed
• Logging driver hours behind the wheel to ensure compliance,
• Notifying you of other driver behavior consistent with impaired, distracted, or sleepy driving to prevent unnecessary accidents and more.

How Does the Score Work?

Some carriers find the CSA scoring system a little complex. All carriers are assigned numbers between 0 and 100. These numbers reflect the percentage of trucking companies who scored higher than your company in a specific group.

What this means is that if your score was 25, only 25 percent of other carriers or companies scored higher than your organization. On the other hand, if your CSA score is 75, that means you have a lot of work to do as 75 percent of your competitors had higher CSA scores in a category than your organization.

Typically scores between 0 and 49 are considered satisfactory scores with scores between 50 and 74 qualifying as conditional scores. Scores between 75 and 100 are unsatisfactory and indicate you have a lot of work to do to improve your situation and your score.

The Takeaway

The great thing about this system is that every month offers opportunities for improvement. Now that you understand your CSA score better, you have an opportunity to affect your score, for the better, in the months to come.

Stay tuned for future articles on Why Good CSA Scores Matter, How and When to Check Your Fleet’s CSA Scores, and Ways to Improve Your CSA Score.

https://fox5sandiego.com/2018/08/07/city-workers-help-couple-recover-30k-wedding-ring-from-landfill/

Pretty much everyone has accidentally thrown something important in the trash at some point in their lives. But one couple from San Diego were distraught when they realized they had accidentally thrown away a wedding ring valued at $30,000.

The couple had been doing some spring cleaning when they realized the valuable ring must have fallen into their trash. When they went to check their garbage can, they discovered their trash had already been hauled away and the truck was traveling just down the road. The helpless couple watched the garbage man drive away with the ring in tow.

In response, the couple called the City of San Diego in a panic. The Environmental Services Department assisted the couple in tracking down their garbage bags on the day they believed she lost her ring.

Workers utilized the garbage truck’s GPS tracking device to determine where exactly it was. Unfortunately, employees had to inform the couple that the neighborhood trash had already been dumped at the Miramar Landfill.

The determined couple decided to personally visit the Miramar Landfill site and search for the ring. They thanked the Environmental Service Department for their agency’s implementation of GPS tracking for waste management which helped them promptly track down their garbage.

Within hours, their trash bags would have quickly been lost under piles of other garbage. Thankfully, their bags were perfectly placed on the top of the trash heap, so they were able to find the ring within four minutes of digging.

The couple and employees assisting with the search were all relieved that the ring was able to be recovered promptly. Jose Ysea, a city spokesman, commented on the event explaining that searching for that ring in the landfill was akin to searching for a needle in a haystack.

Employees are usually stuck searching through the muck for hours on end for lost goods, but thanks to the GPS tracking for garbage trucks, everyone was able to descend on the landfill immediately after the couple’s trash was dropped off.

Heavy traffic, accidents, and bad weather driving can lead to all kinds of stops and starts that are bad news for your fleet vehicles. There are many reasons this type of driving is bad for your vehicle and we’ll explore many of them below.

How Does Rapid Acceleration and Sudden Braking Effect Your Vehicles?

Fleet vehicles travel many miles in the course of a day, week, month, and year. Preserving the mechanical soundness of these vehicles helps them get a few extra miles in their lifetimes before needing mechanical intervention or requiring replacement.

Not only does flooring your accelerators when the light turns green or from a full stop waste gas, but it can also damage your vehicles in the following ways. Fast acceleration, for instance, can cause unnecessary strain on the drivetrain components in your fleet vehicles. Sudden braking causes added wear to the brakes and can result in brake failures or more frequent need to replace the brakes.

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