WASHINGTON — The American Trucking Associations overwhelmingly approved of recent changes made to CSA 2010, but the truck lobby group says it still has concerns that need addressing.

In a letter sent to FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro, the ATA asked for a timetable for establishing a new process within CSA’s safety measurement system for making crash causation determinations.

The ATA has long been concerned that CSA doesn’t make annotations of accidents that are not the fault of the truck driver before entering the incident into the carrier’s record. Carriers, the ATA argues, should be held accountable only for crashes they cause.

In the letter, Dave Osiecki, senior vice-president of policy and regulatory affairs, asked the agency to remove from the measurement system crashes involving documented suicides; another vehicle operating in the wrong direction; a vehicle rear-ending a truck while legally stopped at a traffic light; and a vehicle striking a truck while legally parked off the road or highway.

"It’s reasonable and appropriate, in ATA’s view, to suggest that the commercial driver and carrier involved in each of these types of crashes should be presumed to have no accountability in the crash," Osiecki said in the letter.

Earlier this month, FMCSA adopted several industry suggestions to improve CSA before the December 2010 rollout.

Among other changes, revisions were made to the agency’s method of measuring exposure by how many power units are in the fleet, severity weightings for roadside inspections and accounting for size-and-weight violations.

The result, say carriers who are currently testing the system, is the system is no longer falsely labeling them as deficient.