The Federal Motor Safety Administration (FMCSA) is updating its Safety Measurement System (SMS) scores, which will impact how carrier safety is evaluated. These changes aim to improve road safety by ensuring all carriers, from large fleets to owner-operators, adhere to stricter safety standards. Understanding these upcoming adjustments is crucial for maintaining compliance and operational efficiency.

SMS is a safety rating system used by the FMCSA to identify high-risk motor carriers for investigations, issue warnings, and interventions, or rate each carrier based on their performance. The SMS scores are calculated based on information from crash reports submitted by state officials, driver and vehicle records maintained by FMCSA, roadside inspection data, and other sources. FMCSA uses these scores to identify carriers that may be operating unsafely or in violation of safety regulations. The proposed changes to SMS follow an efficiency study and National Academy of Sciences review that proposed significant changes to the current model. The public comment period ended 05/16/23.

A 2017 NAS National Academy of Sciences study suggested improvements to FMCSA SMS across key category groups and intervention points. The study found that SMS should focus more on individual drivers, carriers’ safety performance, and recent violations. The authors also recommended that the violation severity weights be more straightforward, using percentiles rather than safety groups. Additionally, they suggested adding two more segments to the SMS category scoring system.

The FMCSA will reorganize the current nine safety categories into three new ones: “Compliance,” “Safety Management Systems,” and “Compliance Monitoring.” This could make it easier for carriers to identify areas for improvement and allocate resources accordingly. The agency will group similar violations so they are assessed as a whole rather than individually when determining a carrier’s score. This may simplify compliance tracking by focusing attention on overall performance trends identified during inspections. In addition, intervention thresholds will be adjusted so that more severe violations do not automatically result in lower scores. Let’s take a deeper look at these changes:

The FMCSA has proposed a reorganization of the SMS' safety categories. The new classes will be: Crash Indicator, Unsafe Driving, HM Compliance, Hours-of-Service Compliance, Driver Fitness, Vehicle Maintenance: Driver Observed, and Vehicle Maintenance.

The FMCSA will group violations into violation groups. The goal of this action is to make it easier for carriers to see where their safety scores are coming from and what areas they should work on improving. This change in process has been well received by industry experts, who see it as an opportunity for carriers to improve their overall score by focusing on specific areas where they may have been previously deficient.

The new intervention thresholds will be based on the carrier’s safety rating. Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, and HOS Compliance will receive high intervention threshold scores. The Vehicle Maintenance Driver Observed category would have new thresholds of 65, 75, and 80 for passenger carriers, HM, and General, respectively. New HM Compliance category intervention scores will be 90, 90, and 90 for passenger carriers, HM, and General. New Driver Fitness scores will be 65, 75, and 80.

The FMCSA is simplifying the severity weight of violations. Unsafe driving violations will be given a severity weight of two, while all others will have a severity weight of one. This is intended to help quickly identify carriers with a high crash rate. The SMS will now be a compilation of 959 + 14 violation data points, increasing from the previous 749 + 5. The new system will also focus more heavily on recent violations instead of older ones. Violations will be consolidated to 116, making it easier to manage your scores and identify areas for improvement. There won’t be a percentile jump when a carrier moves to a new safety event group, meaning your score will stay at the same level as before. The new system will be more accurate, consistent, and efficient than the old one.

The SMS will now focus on recent violations. The SMS’s new scoring formula will not consider a carrier’s entire history but only the most recent three years of violations. In many cases, this could result in a lower score for an otherwise safe company because of an isolated incident that occurred during that period. These changes will significantly affect motor brokers, carriers, and motorists. Motor carriers must pay more attention to their safety scores and compliance with regulations. Motor carriers will be required to pay more attention to their safety management systems, including employee training and drug testing programs.

The FMCSA has built a portal for motor carriers to view their safety scores under the new rating system. This is important because it allows carriers to see what they need to improve to receive better scores and avoid interventions by the agency. The portal is available at https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/smsportal