The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration wants to develop a new process for determining when a motor carrier isn’t safe and is asking the public to weigh in.
FMCSA plans to publish an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on Tuesday, Aug. 29 that asks for feedback on the need for a rulemaking to revise the regulations prescribing the safety fitness determination process.
The public will have 60 days to comment on the agency’s current safety fitness determination regulations and the available data and costs for regulatory alternatives.
“This advance notice of proposed rulemaking seeks input regarding new methodologies that would determine when a motor carrier is not fit to operate commercial motor vehicles in or affecting interstate commerce,” the agency wrote in the notice. “The intended effect of this action is to more effectively use FMCSA data and resources to identify unfit motor carriers and to remove them from the nation’s roadways. A successful safety fitness determination methodology may target metrics that are most directly connected to safety outcomes; provide for accurate identification of unsafe motor carriers; and incentivize the adoption of safety-improving practices.”
Current regulations
Safety fitness determination is currently based on an analysis of existing motor carrier data and data collected during a compliance review. The process uses six factors – general, driver, operational, vehicle, hazardous materials and accidents – to assign a motor carrier’s safety fitness rating.
The current system provides carriers an overall safety rating of either satisfactory, conditional or unsatisfactory.
“The agency’s current safety fitness determination process is resource-intensive and reaches only a small percentage of motor carriers,” FMCSA wrote in the notice.
In fiscal year 2019, FMCSA and states conducted 11,671 compliance reviews out of the 567,000 possible interstate carriers.
FMCSA’s CSA Safety Measurement System currently isn’t used to generate safety fitness determinations. In 2016, FMCSA published a notice of proposed rulemaking that would have used a carrier’s absolute measure in SMS to generate unfit safety fitness determinations. The proposal received more than 150 comments, including opposition from the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and other trade groups. In 2017, FMCSA withdrew the notice of proposed rulemaking.
Questions
FMCSA’s notice asks the public to answer a dozen questions regarding potential updates to the safety fitness procedures.
Some of those questions include:
- Should FMCSA retain the current three-tiered rating system of Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory and Conditional? Why or why not?
- Should FMCSA include additional hazmat regulatory requirements in the safety fitness determination calculation?
- Should motor carriers of passengers be subject to higher standards than other motor carriers in terms of safety fitness rating methodology?
- The current safety fitness determination does not use all available safety data, such as all inspection-based data. Should the SMS methodology be used to issue safety fitness determinations in a manner similar to what was proposed in the 2016 notice of proposed rulemaking?
- What changes, additions or deletions from the current list of critical and acute violations should be included in the notice of proposed rulemaking, and why? Should the list be retained? Why or why not?
- Should safety fitness determinations consider motor carriers’ adoption and use of safety technologies in a carrier’s rating?
- Given that unsafe driving behaviors, such as speeding and texting while driving, are highly correlated with crash risk, should the safety fitness rating methodology give more weight to such unsafe driving violations?
A full list of the questions can be found in the notice.
How to comment
Once the advance notice of proposed rulemaking is published, the public will have 60 days to comment. To do so, go to the regulations.gov website and enter Docket No. FMCSA-2022-0003. LL
Credit: Source link
