WASHINGTON — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration plans to change the way it evaluates trucking company safety by upgrading its current ranking model as opposed to installing a new one.
In a notice to be published Wednesday, FMCSA announced it has determined that an advanced statistical model known as Item Response Theory (IRT) — a model touted by the National Academy of Sciences — is “overly complex,” and therefore the agency would not be using it to regulate carrier safety.
Instead, FMCSA has committed to improving its own Safety Management System (SMS) as the way it labels carriers with the highest crash risk and those not fit to operate.
“Safety is FMCSA’s core mission,” said Robin Hutcheson, the agency’s administrator. “The proposed changes are part of the agency’s continued commitment to enhancing the fairness, accuracy and clarity of our prioritization system.”
FMCSA has been under pressure by Congress to improve how it evaluates carrier safety fitness — with the goal of reducing crashes — after changes were called for in the FAST Act of 2015. The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General increased the pressure in 2019 when it called for FMCSA to expedite improvements.
While analyzing the IRT model as a potential remedy, FMCSA found areas in which SMS could be improved to better identify high-risk carriers “without the complications inherent in adopting an IRT model.”
FMCSA summarized the proposed improvements to SMS as:
- Reorganized and updated safety categories, including new segmentation.
- Consolidated violations.
- Simplified violation severity weights.
- Proportionate percentiles instead of safety event groups.
- Improved intervention thresholds.
- Greater focus on recent violations.
- Updated utilization factor.
Among the changes, FMCSA plans to reorganize SMS’ seven Behavior Analysis Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC) to better identify specific safety problems and also pare down the 959 violations used in SMS by combining them into 116 violation groups.
For example, in the Driver Fitness BASIC, carriers that operate straight trucks, as opposed to combination tractor-trailers, have much higher violation rates than those that operate combination vehicles, FMCSA found. Therefore, “segmenting the Driver Fitness BASIC into Straight and Combination segments more effectively identifies carriers with higher crash rates in both segments.”
In addition, FMCSA acknowledged that assigning severity weights to violations in SMS on a scale of 1 to 10 “has been criticized as overly subjective.” The agency subsequently found simplifying the severity weights identifies carriers with higher crash rates.
“This change would maintain the safety focus on those violations severe enough to result in an [out-of-service] order while removing the subjectivity and complications of distinguishing each violation by severity on a scale of 1 through 10.”
FMCSA also intends to focus more on recent violations when prioritizing carriers for roadside inspections. If all a carrier’s violations in a particular safety category are 12 months or older, it will not be assigned a percentile in that category.
FMCSA found this change would result in 1,081 carriers no longer having a safety category at or above the threshold for the agency having to intervene and that those carriers had a crash rate 13% lower than the national average.
“Removing carriers with no recent violation in those safety categories would allow the agency to focus its resources on carriers that pose a greater safety risk,” FMCSA stated.
One change FMCSA considered – but would not be proposing – is attempting to account for differences in inspection and violation rates among states, which some have asserted leads to unfair SMS results for carriers operating in high-enforcement states.
However, “applying a model that de-emphasizes enforcement in certain states would disincentivize FMCSA’s…partners from undertaking enforcement initiatives that are intended to address particular safety issues in their states,” FMCSA contends. “FMCSA believes that it should encourage all states to continually raise the bar for safety rather than discounting the safety efforts of certain states.”
Commenting on FMCSA’s proposed changes to SMS, “what surprised us was the foundational nature” of some of the changes, P. Sean Garney, co-director of Scopelitis Transportation Consulting, told FreightWaves.
“It’s going to take some time to understand what impact these changes will have on the regulated community,” Garney said. “Ultimately, the mark of success for any of these changes is how it impacts crash rate. Time will tell.”
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, in contrast, is critical of the changes FMCSA is proposing and believes the agency should be putting its resources elsewhere.
“The overwhelming majority of data the agency collects and analyzes has no connection to crashes – none,” commented OOIDA President Todd Spencer. “The cause of highway safety would be best served by the agency moving ahead swiftly with the Large Truck Safety Causal factors study authorized by Congress. You never fix any problem without a clear understanding of what caused it.”
FMCSA is providing a 90-day comment period on the proposal, which will be due May 16. The agency is also conducting four public online question-and-answer webinars. Registration for those can be found here.
Considered trucker
My company failed due to judgment of an officer doing a roadside inspection. He put my driver and my trailer oss. It was fought and lost because the Tx Dps wouldn’t look at the facts and based it on the officers findings at the time of inspection. A unified system across every state needs to be implemented with Dot and Fmcsa. The people that try and do everything legit, still get punished for other’s actions!
Ray E Plucker
I personally think government should stay out of our business. You have no clue as to what goes on in trucking much less how to operate a big truck a lot of DOT Have no idea either but the badge looks great and the power rush is awesome I bet but one day us truck drivers are going to get sick of all the abuse we have to take from government and DOT. You thought it was a great idea to put kids in truck so you lowered age to 18 now you talking about lowering it again to 16 this should show everyone that government has no place in trucking
K. Dwain Miller
0ne thing ” F0R $URE ” ; These Long Haul Truckers nowadays, D0N’T HAVE HALF THE $KILL$ 0F A 10 $PEED $HIFTER FR0M THE 80’s & 90’s. Courtesy & $afety, along with Common $ense, are missing from this ” New Breed ” of Truckers. Eastbound, What U leave behind U ?
(As I’m BL0WIN’ D00R$ 0FF traveling Westbound) G0E$ UNAN$WERED!!! 10-4 & 0ut
Sarah
As a Towing Operation, we have soon a large increase in multiple truck accidents. We believe the regulations which are putting trucks out of service lead to many truckers under stress to make impossible time deadlines which were imposed prior to those changes. Increased speed has been a huge factor.
Steve
As a person who in 2003 helped develop the electronic log was suppose to be a help for safety and a more reasonable way to keep a log, simplify things for all. Electronic logs worked fine for the first few years, then the “brains” or people who know nothing about trucking started to fix things. Back then great attempts to protect privacy were taken. Now you have no privacy and I truly believe the practice of going back into your log over 7 days to get a violation is an invasion of privacy and a violation of the 5th amendment. What happened to the safety aspect of trucking? So pull a guy over who is perfectly legal and because you (who did not witness it or was not there) puts a driver out of service because he PC home. Although the driver swears it is legitimate because the officer differs he puts him out and violates him. Or you have an officer that decides to go fishing in the data for 30 days or better and comes up with 5 violations which goes on the record when in reality they were 30 minute breaks a minute short and violates the driver for false log. I am sure this industry is not going to put up with this and start suing. Maybe we could give the ambulance chasers something better to do than sue trucks?
Jedd Dojan
I thought the ELD mandate was to make the trucking world safer. I see in the article below that trucking accident are up 19%. Oh that’s right the ELD mandate was all about money not safety.
David Moore
Greetings, after reading the above article on FMCSA,SMS scores; Thank you for improvements and continued Highway safety collaboration between drivers and carriers. In all fairness to companies with crashes or negative reviews on their records. I would like to ask that all data, information, reporting, be reviewed case by case before any changes be made to;Suspend someone’s authority. The FMCSA should work with carriers that are making improvements and can show records and or written plans to improve safety. Furthermore drivers involved in accidents, crashes, should be able to point out and defend their record by showing evidence of police report or other agency reports, And or video footage from the truck. to overall keep the record straight. In some for instances some crashes are unavoidable. Sometimes things are out of our control. No matter what decision is made by the driver in the moment it can be interpreted that the driver did everything possible to avoid the crash. Showing the driver had every good intention for safety of People around him equipment and the load being transported. For example: Within the past 12 years I’ve had three accidents in a commercial motor vehicle. First One, I was involved in was caused by an inebriated driver operating a stolen vehicle in Tennessee. Although that’s not my fault that that driver crashed into me it is still on my crash report. Second. In Ohio on a snowy day there was a pick up truck entering the highway on US 30 eastbound that lost control and admitted losing control made contact with me and my equipment putting me out of service and causing me several days of loss revenue. Third accident in New Jersey on I 78 E. bound cause I had another tractor-trailer coming over in my lane. After sharing video evidence to the police and to the court I was finally able to have all charges dismissed. However it is still on a accident report showing a crash. In the video it is clear the tractor-trailer changing lanes causing me to slow down and lose control in the median it was covered with snow and ice resulting in the rollover of a tractor trailer. I could’ve been killed and yet I still had to fight a court system to prove my innocence. So I’d like to asked that all information and records be reviewed before making a judgment and giving carriers& Drivers equal opportunity; to put it in writing exactly what happened from their perspectives. I, do everything possible to protect the people around us but There’s still a report that is inaccurate. Furthermore that report affects how much it cost for me to operate with insurances. I agree we all need to work together to mitigate the gaps in safety checks on all equipment personnel equipment and commercial equipment on the road. For example I’ve seen videos on TikTok and Facebook social media sites and YouTube to name a few mechanics pointing out were brakes and rotors are completely gone on personal passenger vehicles tires were bald steering was damaged I believe one day a month all FMCSA agents and State DOT officers should Open scale houses for everyone to go through as a checkpoint for all vehicles on the highway; requirements license registration and proof of insurance vehicle, inspection. Doing this unannounced as a surprise inspection different days all lower48 states to help enforce public safety.
JASMEET SINGH
SMS SYSTEM IS TOTALLY BOGUS . IT GIVES FALSE INFORMATION TO EVERY ONE INCLUDING DOT , FREIGHT BROKERS AND PUBLIC , ETC . THEIR ARE BETTER WAY TO PREVENT ACCIDENTS IN USA .