Safety fitness process shouldn’t penalize carriers without a rating, OOIDA says

Any changes to the safety fitness determination process should not penalize motor carriers that do not receive a rating.

That was the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s message to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in formal comments filed on Wednesday, Nov. 29.

FMCSA published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on Aug. 29 that asked for feedback on whether the process to determine a motor carrier’s safety fitness needs to be revised. Comments were accepted through Wednesday, Nov. 29.

OOIDA said the current safety fitness determination process has been ineffective.

“The FMCSA safety fitness determination process has a direct effect on motor carriers’ ability to stay in business,” OOIDA wrote in its comments. “Historically, the safety fitness determination structure has not been proven as a reliable methodology to properly determine a motor carrier’s fitness to operate. Most of the (program’s) shortcomings relate to the inaccuracy and inconsistency of the data that is collected and analyzed during a safety investigation.”

A safety fitness determination is currently given to a trucking company only after a compliance review is conducted.

OOIDA noted that the current system reaches only a small percentage of motor carriers.

“In fiscal year 2019, FMCSA and its state partners conducted 11,671 compliance reviews out of a population of more than 567,000 active interstate motor carriers,” OOIDA wrote. “These factors contribute to an unreliable system that does not produce uniform or objective safety fitness determinations … Any reforms must not penalize the overwhelming majority of carriers that will never receive a rating.”

The program won’t work without reliable information, OOIDA told the agency.

“As FMCSA pursues the development of a new methodology to determine when a motor carrier is unfit to operate, the agency must avoid relying on the Compliance, Safety, Accountability and Safety Measurement System programs,” OOIDA wrote. “Since their inception in 2010, CSA and SMS have completely failed in their objective to reduce injuries, fatalities and crashes. This will not change until CSA/SMS incentivizes actual safety performance instead of regulatory compliance.”

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. OOIDA, as well as others, pushed back against the proposal, and it was eventually withdrawn.

According to the regulations.gov website, FMCSA received 176 comments on the notice. Now the agency must review the comments before determining whether or not to move forward with a formal proposal. LL