FMCSA Asks Whether to Rewrite How It Rates Carrier Safety Fitness

In August 2023, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) asked the public whether it should rewrite the way it decides that a motor carrier is unfit to operate. An advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) published on August 29, 2023 sought comments by October 30, 2023, under docket FMCSA-2022-0003.

An ANPRM is an early step. It did not propose rule text; FMCSA said it wanted input on whether a rulemaking was needed, what data and science were available, and how the current process worked in practice.

How safety ratings worked

FMCSA's safety fitness determinations (SFDs) were based on investigations, called compliance reviews, done at a carrier's place of business or remotely. The review looked at six factors: general requirements, drivers, operations (including hours of service), vehicles, hazardous materials, and the carrier's recordable accident rate. Violations of "acute" and "critical" regulations earned points within those factors, and the factor results produced an overall rating of Satisfactory, Conditional or Unsatisfactory.

FMCSA said the process was resource-intensive and reached only a small share of carriers. In fiscal year 2019, the last year before the pandemic, it and its state partners conducted 11,671 compliance reviews out of a population of more than 567,000 active interstate motor carriers. Those reviews produced 306 final Unsatisfactory ratings, 1,842 Conditional ratings and 2,701 Satisfactory ratings.

The agency also noted that its Safety Measurement System (SMS), which uses roadside inspection and crash data to prioritize carriers for interventions, was not used in any way to generate safety ratings.

The 2016 proposal

This was not FMCSA's first attempt. In January 2016 it proposed basing fitness determinations on on-road safety data, investigation results, or both, and replacing the three ratings with a single determination of Unfit. The agency withdrew that proposal in 2017 to await a National Academy of Sciences study of SMS required by the FAST Act.

FMCSA said many of the arguments for change still applied. A rating was a snapshot taken at the time of an investigation. A Satisfactory rating could stay in place indefinitely and be mistaken for agency approval of current operations. And a carrier with breakdowns in several areas could end up Conditional and keep operating.

What FMCSA asked

The ANPRM posed a long list of questions. Among them, FMCSA asked:

• whether to keep the Satisfactory, Conditional and Unsatisfactory tiers, or move to a single Unfit rating as proposed in 2016;
• whether SMS methodology, or more inspection data in some other form, should be used to issue fitness determinations;
• how driver behaviour data should be included, and how to treat data with and without a conviction;
• whether passenger carriers should face higher standards;
• what changes should be made to the list of acute and critical violations;
• whether a carrier's use of safety technologies should count in its rating;
• whether the administrative review and corrective action procedures should be revised.

The agency also asked how states would be affected and what resources they would need if the process changed.

Where SMS fit in

The ANPRM made no specific proposals, but it did ask for views on using SMS methodology for fitness determinations, and it updated readers on that work. The National Academy of Sciences had recommended that FMCSA test a statistical approach known as item response theory (IRT). FMCSA said its testing showed the IRT model was biased toward smaller carriers with few inspections, hard for the public to understand or reproduce, and took four weeks to run compared with two days for SMS. It said it would not replace SMS with IRT and would instead keep improving SMS, pointing to its February 15, 2023 notice on that subject.

For carriers, the August 2023 notice changed nothing on its own; it opened the question of how future ratings might be assigned.

Archive: this article describes rules and events as of August 2023. Regulations may have changed since, so check the current rule before relying on it.