SMS proposal explained through FMCSA webinar

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is proposing significant changes to its Safety Measurement System for motor carriers. On Tuesday, March 7, the agency offered the first of three webinars aimed at explaining the proposed changes.

Among the changes are reorganized safety categories, simplified severity weights for safety violations and a greater focus on recent violations.

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.”

Proposed 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 non-safety related reasons 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.Set featured image
• 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.

Yessen said that prioritizing violations in the past year will improve the agency’s ability to focus on motor carriers with a higher crash risk.

Prioritization preview

FMCSA has 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.

In addition, FMCSA provided the webinar on March 7 and has more webinars scheduled for March 14 and March 15. Click on the links to register.

Background

FMCSA implemented SMS in 2010 as part of an effort to identify high-risk motor carriers for investigation.

In 2017, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences recommended that FMCSA develop and test a new statistical model. As part of its recommendations, the council said FMCSA should develop an Item Response Theory model, which is a more statistical principled approach.

As part of the webinar on March 7, Catterson Oh of the FMCSA’s Compliance Division said that the agency isn’t using Item Response Theory because a study determined it was “too inherently complex and lacking in transparency without actually improving the ability to identify carriers with higher crash rates.”

OOIDA response

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association said that flaws remain in the proposed system.

“The proposed changes will not fix the broken structural deficiencies of the Safety Measurement System,” said Jay Grimes, OOIDA’s director of federal affairs. “Since the inception of the CSA and SMS in 2010, these programs have completely failed in their objective to reduce injuries, fatalities and crashes. This will not change until SMS incentivizes actual safety performance instead of regulatory compliance. There has never been more compliance or more enforcement within the trucking industry, yet crashes continue going in the wrong direction.”

How to comment

FMCSA’s 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