November 18, 2015 Vol. 12 No. 22

There’s hope these days that one of the worst examples of safety legislation ever devised in the U.S. will get a makeover in the next year or so. That may be optimistic, but with a multi-year highway bill now almost through the Washington meat grinder, the Compliance, Safety and Accountability (CSA) program looks bound to change. One of the bill’s many aims is one that would require the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to rework its mighty flawed reporting regime.

Common sense, that oh-so-rare feature of regulatory reality, may yet prevail.

And that would be a boon to the thousands of Canadian carriers, drivers, and owner-operators who use American highways. Like their south-of-the-border counterparts, they might just see an end to what can frequently be wildly unfair safety assessments based on flawed principles and weird math.

If you don’t want to wait, and I sure wouldn’t, there’s help at hand. It comes from Vigillo LLC, a data-mining company that offers fleet subscribers a rather sophisticated CSA analytics service. It’s designed to aggregate, organize, and deliver complex carrier safety data in a scorecard format. More particularly, the help comes from a new and additional service called JUST, which will properly examine an accident submitted for review by subscriber carriers.

I’m not in the habit of endorsing specific products or services but in this case I’m going to sound like it. I’m making an exception for two reasons: one, CSA really is that bad; and two, there’s nothing else like JUST. I’m pretty confident in doing this after hearing countless bitches from fleets and drivers in recent years. And after spending the better of an hour on the phone with Vigillo CEO and founder Steve Bryan, a very down-to-earth guy. With 2000 fleets subscribing to his service, including a few hundred in Canada, there’s probably nobody who understands the legislation better, in theory or practice. In fact, Vigillo has the largest database of carrier safety data outside of the FMCSA.