FMCSA Proposes Overhaul of CSA's Safety Measurement System
A February 2023 notice proposed new safety categories, 116 violation groups and simpler severity weights for the system FMCSA uses to target carriers.
In February 2023, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) proposed a broad overhaul of the Safety Measurement System (SMS), the tool it uses under its Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program to pick motor carriers for safety interventions. A notice published on February 15, 2023 explained the proposal, opened a preview for carriers and asked for comments by May 16, 2023, under docket FMCSA-2022-0066.
Why FMCSA revisited SMS
FMCSA had used SMS since December 2010. A 2017 National Academy of Sciences report, required by the FAST Act, recommended that the agency develop and test a new statistical model. FMCSA said that work, together with improvements it had floated in 2016, led to seven combined changes: reorganized safety categories, consolidated violations, simplified severity weights, "proportionate percentiles," adjusted intervention thresholds, a sharper focus on recent violations, and an updated Utilization Factor.
New safety categories
The existing BASICs would be renamed "safety categories" and reshuffled into seven: Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, Hours of Service Compliance, Vehicle Maintenance, Vehicle Maintenance: Driver Observed, Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance and Driver Fitness.
- The Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC would disappear as a separate category, with its violations moving into Unsafe Driving.
- Violations for operating while under an out-of-service (OOS) order would also move into Unsafe Driving, instead of being spread across categories based on the underlying OOS violation.
- Vehicle Maintenance would be split in two. The new Driver Observed category would hold violations a driver could spot on a pre- or post-trip inspection or while driving.
- Driver Fitness and HM Compliance would be segmented, so that straight-truck carriers were compared with each other, and cargo tank carriers with each other.
Simpler scoring
FMCSA said the number of violation codes used in SMS had grown to 959, many of them more specific versions of existing violations. It proposed consolidating them into 116 groups. Severity weights on a 1-to-10 scale, which the agency acknowledged had been criticized as subjective, would be replaced with weights of one or two. OOS violations, and Unsafe Driving violations that are disqualifying offenses under 49 CFR 383.51, would carry a weight of two.
"Proportionate percentiles" were meant to end the sudden percentile jumps some carriers saw when a single clean inspection moved them into a different safety event group. FMCSA said that once benchmarks were set, changes in a carrier's percentile would depend only on its own performance.
Recent violations and mileage
Carriers would be assigned a percentile in a category only if they had at least one violation in that category in the past 12 months. FMCSA estimated that 1,081 carriers would no longer be at or above an intervention threshold, and said that group had a crash rate 13 percent below the national average.
The Utilization Factor, which adjusts for high-mileage operations in Unsafe Driving and Crash Indicator, would be extended from carriers running up to 200,000 vehicle miles traveled per power unit to those running up to 250,000. FMCSA also proposed raising the HM Compliance threshold from the 80th to the 90th percentile.
A preview for carriers
With the February 2023 SMS update, carriers could log in to a prioritization preview on FMCSA's CSA website to see how the proposed method would affect their own results, and FMCSA said it would hold question-and-answer sessions. The notice made clear these were proposals; the changes were not yet in use.
Archive: this article describes rules and events as of February 2023. Regulations may have changed since, so check the current rule before relying on it.