FMCSA Plans Tweaks to Safety Measurement System

Federal regulators have proposed revisions to how they calculate motor carriers’ safety scores. 

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) said in a Feb. 14 release that these changes will highlight companies that need the most intervention. 

Chief among these changes is a broad reorganization of the Safety Measurement System (SMS) that determines whether a carrier’s safety record warrants agency intervention. This includes restructuring the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category (BASIC) method of assessment from 959 types of violations to 116 classes of violations. 

FMCSA also proposes simplifying how various violations are treated, placing roadside violations into different categories based on severity, tweaking the SMS levels for agency intervention and focusing more on comparing similar carriers to one another. 

All of this data will be available on a new Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) Prioritization Preview website, which is already live. The site includes a sample review of a fictional company’s safety record, to illustrate FMCSA’s intent with the site. 

The revisions were prompted in part by a 2017 recommendation from the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, which pushed FMCSA to develop an entirely new SMS model. While FMCSA rejected such dramatic changes, it did incorporate some of the recommendations into the new proposal. 

“Safety is FMCSA’s core mission. The proposed changes are part of the agency’s continued commitment to enhancing the fairness, accuracy and clarity of our prioritization system,” stated Robin Hutcheson, FMCSA administrator. 

The agency will be accepting public comment on the proposed changes through May 16. FMCSA will also be holding four public opinion webinars, where participants can receive live answers to their questions. The dates and times of these webinars will be announced on the FMCSA website.