FMCSA takes steps in starting Beyond Compliance program

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration seeks information from motor carriers so that it can begin to implement the congressionally mandated Beyond Compliance program.

The notice and request for comments, which is set to publish in the Federal Register on Wednesday, Dec. 18, aims to obtain information from motor carriers so that the agency can “study the effectiveness of various technologies, programs, and policies on motor carrier safety performance in support of the implementation of the Fact Act’s Beyond Compliance requirements.”

This step by FMCSA is an information collection request to help the agency eventually take the Beyond Compliance program through the rulemaking process.  

FAST Act

Based off 2015’s Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, FMCSA is required to give credit to motor carriers that install advanced safety equipment, use enhanced driver fitness measures, adopt fleet safety management tools and programs, or satisfy other standards determined appropriate by the FMCSA administrator. The idea behind the Beyond Compliance program is to reward motor carriers that go above and beyond what is required to ensure safe operation.

The FAST Act also requires FMCSA to carry out the Beyond Compliance provisions through incorporating a methodology into the Compliance Safety Accountability program, or establishing a safety Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category (BASIC).

“The data being collected for this study consists of responses from a select group of motor carriers on the most effective technologies, programs and policies for achieving safe operations,” the FMCSA notice said. “The study does not attempt to conduct a full survey of the motor carrier population. Instead, it relies on expert opinion from carriers that are objectively determined to exhibit safe operations that exceed industry averages as indicated by driver out-of-service rates, vehicle out-of-service rates, and crash rates.”

To identify the carriers for the survey, FMCSA said the study will use existing data from the Motor Carrier Management Information System.

Pay to play?

Critics of a Beyond Compliance program view it as being biased toward large fleets and being a pay-to-play system.

“Certainly, we don’t want to see it limited to only technology-based equipment being installed on your truck,” said Jay Grimes, OOIDA’s director of federal affairs. “We’d like to see it more broadly based, whether it’s better driver retention … We’ve seen that better driver pay leads to better safety performance as well. We’d like to widen the base, where it’s not all about putting the bells and whistles on your truck. In the end, that’s only going to be rewarding the bigger companies that can afford all of that. A lot of that doesn’t make a lot of sense for the small-business trucker who has years and years of proven safety without necessarily installing that technology.”

Public comments on the information collection request will be accepted for 60 days once the notice is published in the Federal Register. Once published, comments can be made at the Regulations.gov website by entering docket number FMCSA-2018-0328.