SMS proposal to be explained at webinars

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will offer motor carriers a pair of opportunities this week to learn about the agency’s proposed changes to the Safety Measurement System.

FMCSA will host webinars to explain the proposal at 3 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, March 14 and 11 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, March 15. Click the links to register.

“FMCSA will hold public online question and answer webinars, during which participants will be able to ask questions about the preview and the proposed changes and receive real-time answers, time permitting,” the agency wrote. “Space is limited and available on a first come, first served basis. The webinars will be recorded and posted on the CSA Prioritization Preview website for those who are unable to attend.”

In February, FMCSA published a notice with a proposal for changes to its Safety Measurement System aimed at making it easier to identify companies that need intervention.

Proposed SMS changes

• Reorganized BASICS. Now called safety categories, the focus would be on motor carriers with higher crash rates with the goal of more accurately determining unsafe behaviors.
• Reorganized roadside violations. More than 950 violations would be condensed into 116 violation groups.
• Simplified severity weights. A 1-10 scale would be replaced by a 1-2 scale.
• Improved intervention thresholds. The thresholds would be adjusted for three safety categories to focus on carriers with the highest crash rates.
• Proportionate percentiles. The proposal would eliminate large percentile changes that occur for reasons unrelated to safety to more precisely indicate how a motor carrier’s performance is trending from month to month.
• Greater focus on recent violations. Percentiles would only be calculated for safety categories in which a carrier has received a violation within the past 12 months.
• Updated utilization factor. The goal would be to receive a more accurate account of on-road exposure of motor carriers with the most vehicle-miles-traveled per vehicle.
• New segmentation. Carriers would be segmented by operation and vehicle type in an attempt to improve carrier-to-carrier comparisons.
• Accounting for not preventable crashes. Results from the Crash Preventability Determination Program would be incorporated into the prioritization methodology.

Previous webinar

FMCSA hosted its first webinar on March 7. David Yessen, chief of FMCSA’s Compliance Division, said the changes are being made to improve highway safety.

“More than 4,000 people die in large truck and bus crashes each year,” Yessen said. “The fundamental goal at FMCSA is to bring that number down.”

In addition to the webinars, FMCSA created a webpage that allows motor carriers to view what their SMS results would be under the proposed methodology. A video on how to preview the results can be found here.

How to comment

FMCSA’s SMS proposal is open to public comment through May 16. To comment, click here or go to the Regulations.gov website and enter Docket No. FMCSA-2022-0066. LL