The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on Thursday, Jan. 16 held its first of three webinars designed to inform motor carriers about changes to the Safety Measurement System.
FMCSA is in the process of updating its system to display the results of a new SMS methodology that will attempt to improve the “fairness, accuracy and clarity” of the program.
The agency uses SMS to prioritize motor carriers that require intervention.
The meeting focused on three of the nine changes coming to the Safety Measurement System.
- Reorganized BASICS. FMCSA is reorganizing the vehicle maintenance and unsafe driving BASICS (now called compliance categories) to focus on motor carriers with higher crash rates and more accurately pinpoint unsafe behaviors.
- Reorganized roadside violations. The agency is reorganizing more than 2,000 violation codes into approximately 100 violation groups of similar safety behaviors to prevent inconsistencies that occur when multiple violations are cited for a single or very similar underlying issue.
- Simplified severity weights. FMCSA is replacing the 1-10 weighting scale for violations in SMS with a 1-2 scale.
Along with the condensed violation groups, motor carriers will no longer be dinged for the same type of violation multiple times in the same inspection. For instance, the new methodology will count an hours-of-service violation as a single violation rather than penalizing the carrier for driving beyond the 14-, 11-, eight- and 70-hour limits.
“If a carrier is cited with all these violations in an inspection, SMS will treat this as a single violation,” said Wesley Russell of FMCSA’s Transportation Specialist Compliance Division. “It treats motor carriers a little more evenly and fairly.”
Despite supporting some of the proposed changes, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association said that FMCSA needs to incentivize actual safety performance over compliance in order to accurately identify at-risk carriers and reduce crashes.
Q&A session
Toward the end of the webinar, members of the public were given time to ask questions about the SMS update. Below are a sample of some of the questions that were asked.
Q. When will these changes be implemented?
FMCSA currently is in the second phase of the update. The launch of the new system will occur in phase three. The agency could not provide a date of when that will happen but said that a notice will be published in the Federal Register before changes take effect.
“When we do make a decision on implementation, we plan to make another Federal Register notice with significant lead time,” said David Yessen, chief of FMCSA’s compliance division. “There will be sufficient advance notice.”
Q. Will the changes be retroactive?
Once the new system is live, it will recalculate data based on the two-year history of that date.
Additional questions can be sent here.
FMCSA’s second webinar about changes to SMS will take place from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern on Feb. 25. LL
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