FMCSA brings property carriers absolute measures back into public view

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) yesterday reversed its changes made in December to its Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) program, as per the FAST (Fixing America’s Surface Transportation) Act that called for changes to improve transparency in the FMCSA’s oversight activity.

The five-year old CSA program was designed to weed out as many as 5 percent—or 150,000—of the nation’s 3 million or so long-haul truck drivers that the feds believe are involved in a disproportionately high number of truck accidents and fatalities. CSA uses a complex scoring system to rate the nation’s nearly 700,000 DOT-registered interstate trucking entities on seven “Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories,” known as “BASICs.” The seven BASICs are driving, fatigued driving, driver fitness, alcohol and drugs, vehicle maintenance, cargo security (now HM Compliance) and crash history. Carriers are given “scores” in each category—higher the score, worse the performance. So-called “warning letters” go out to fleets with scores above 65 (which means that only 35 percent of carriers in their class have worse scores). For hazmat carriers, the cutoff score is 60.

In December, FMCSA said it was removing information previously available on the FMCSA’s website related to property carriers’ compliance and safety performance until appropriate changes were made.

This entailed removing “information regarding carrier alerts or percentile ranks, or scores made publicly available until FMCSA completes it corrective action plan…and determined by the FMCSA to not have been the truck driver or motor carrier’s fault also be removed. Finally, percentile ranks and alerts (rates and absolute measures) shall remain publicly available. Carriers will be able to access their respective data, including percentile ranks and alerts. Also, law enforcement officials will continue to be able to access scores and use them for enforcement prioritization,” according to a summary from the American Trucking Associations last December.

In a statement issued yesterday, the FMCSA said that as per a mandate in the FAST Act that required it to keep property carriers’ absolute measures, which are generated directly from safety data and not based on relative comparison to other motor carriers, available to the public. And it explained that the FAST Act prohibits the display of a property carriers’ relative percentile, leading it to remove the absolute measures to allow time to modify the Safety Measurement System (SMS) website to be compliant.

“At this time, those modifications are complete, and the SMS Website is fully compliant with the FAST Act,” FMCSA said. “All information on passenger carriers continues to remain available.”