Safety fitness comments due Wednesday, Nov. 29

Time is running out for truckers to submit comments on a notice from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that considers changing how the agency determines a motor carrier’s safety fitness.

FMCSA published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on Aug. 29 that asked for feedback on whether the safety fitness determination process needs to be revised. The public has through Wednesday, Nov. 29 to comment.

The original deadline was Oct. 30, but FMCSA granted requests from the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, the American Trucking Associations and the American Bus Association to extend the comment period by 30 days.

“This advance notice of proposed rulemaking seeks input regarding new methodologies that would determine when a motor carrier is not fit to operate commercial motor vehicles in or affecting interstate commerce,” the agency wrote in the notice. “The intended effect of this action is to more effectively use FMCSA data and resources to identify unfit motor carriers and to remove them from the nation’s roadways. A successful safety fitness determination methodology may target metrics that are most directly connected to safety outcomes; provide for accurate identification of unsafe motor carriers; and incentivize the adoption of safety-improving practices.”

Current system

A safety fitness determination is currently given to a trucking company only after a compliance review is conducted. The process is resource-intensive and reaches only a small percentage of motor carriers. In fiscal year 2019, FMCSA and states conducted 11,671 compliance reviews out of the 567,000 possible interstate carriers.

FMCSA’s CSA Safety Measurement System currently isn’t used to generate safety fitness determinations. In 2016, FMCSA published a notice of proposed rulemaking that would have used a carrier’s absolute measure in SMS to generate unfit safety fitness determinations. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association as well as others pushed back against the proposal, and it was eventually withdrawn.

FMCSA’s safety fitness notice

FMCSA’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking includes 12 questions aimed at helping the agency craft a forthcoming proposal.

Examples of the questions include:

• Should FMCSA retain the current three-tiered rating system of Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory and Conditional? Why or why not?
• What changes, additions or deletions from the current list of critical and acute violations should be included in the notice of proposed rulemaking, and why? Should the list be retained? Why or why not?
• Should safety fitness determinations consider motor carriers’ adoption and use of safety technologies in a carrier’s rating?
• Given that unsafe driving behaviors, such as speeding and texting while driving, are highly correlated with crash risk, should the safety fitness rating methodology give more weight to such unsafe driving violations?

How to comment

As of Tuesday, Nov. 28, more than 140 comments had been filed on the Regulations.gov website. To file a comment, click here or go to the regulations.gov website and enter Docket No. FMCSA-2022-0003 by the end of the day Wednesday, Nov. 29. LL