This week’s Overdrive Radio episode opens a window onto the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s virtual listening session held last week to discuss the agency’s efforts to potentially improve the safety rating system. That system, used by the agency during compliance reviews to determine carriers’ fitness to operate in interstate commerce, was the subject of a virtual listening session last week. Sit in on much of the session in this podcast, featuring a bevy of views from trucking stakeholders in response to chief areas of inquiry agency reps outlined near the top of the session:
- Whether or not to preserve the three-tier Satisfactory, Conditional and Unsatisfactory ratings
- Input on a potential single-rating system, where only Unfit carriers would be rated
- Whether to give greater weight to behavioral-type violations like those that flow into the “Unsafe Driving” CSA Safety Measurement System (SMS) category
- And whether the CSA SMS or another system utilizing roadside inspection-generated data might serve to underpin a new safety rating methodology.
[Related: Another reason to fight traffic tickets: Convictions can now impact independents’ safety ratings]
Regular Overdrive readers will certainly know the effort around the potential safety rating change has been a long time in coming. Since the CSA Safety Measurement System came into play a decade and a half ago, it’s as if it’s always been on the FMCSA’s wish list to use roadside data, possibly even the SMS itself, to determine a safety rating.
Yet past attempts to do so have faltered under scrutiny, with loads of pushback from carriers and owner-operators on the notion. This session was no outlier in that regard, it’s certain.
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Shelton also questioned the agency’s Crash Preventability Determination Program and its efficacy in identifying nonpreventable crashes to exclude them from carriers’ SMS scores. Agency reps on the call noted that nonpreventable determinations would exclude those crashes from a safety rating, yet Shelton told a story about one such he’d seen up close and then attempted to use the DataQs system to remove from the record, only to find out it wasn’t a crash type eligible for review in the preventability program. (Pending changes in that regard continue to be in limbo as the agency reviews comments on a 2023 proposal.)
[Related: Truckers’ ‘nonpreventable’ crash DataQs of utmost importance]
All such issues, Shelton noted, will be big problems for the agency if it plans to utilize roadside and/or other SMS data in a new safety rating system.
Furthermore, Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Federal Affairs Director Jay Grimes, also in the session, urged FMCSA to follow through on the National Academy of Sciences’ full recommendations for improvement of the SMS before even considering its use in any safety rating methodology.
Hear many more views and answers to questions about the effort in the podcast:
The virtual session last week was but one of two that are planned. You can register for the next, July 31 session at this link. As also mentioned in the podcast: FMCSA changes to the CSA SMS methodology remain pending almost a year and a half since proposed. More about those pending changes here.
[Related: Roadside inspections, safety scores should be ‘preventive, not punitive’]