How FMCSA Scores Carrier Safety May Change
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has announced changing its carrier scoring system. This new raft of changes will ensure that carriers meet the high standard safety requirements to reduce road incidents.
The change in the scoring system affects all carriers, including large and small businesses and owner-operators.
Safety Measurement System (SMS)
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 drastic changes to SMS follow an efficiency study by the National Academy of Sciences review that proposed significant changes to the current model. The public has until 05/16/23 to make comments on it.
NAS Study improvements
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 Office of Inspector General (OIG) has signed off on the changes
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 their areas of improvement and target resources accordingly.
The body will group similar violations into one group to be assessed as a whole rather than individually when determining a carrier’s score. This would simplify things greatly because carriers wouldn’t need to worry about keeping track of everything that goes wrong during their inspections anymore–they’ll only have one thing on their minds: making sure nothing else happens like this again!
In addition, there will be a re-adjusting of intervention thresholds so that more severe violations don’t automatically trigger lower scores. Let’s take a deeper look at these changes:
Reorganizing the SMS’s safety categories:
The FMCSA has proposed a reorganization of the SMS’s safety categories. The new classes will be:
- Crash Indicator
- Driving Unsafe
- HM compliance
- Service Hours Compliance
- Driver Fitness
- Vehicle maintenance Driver Observed and
- Vehicle Maintenance.
Grouping violations into violation groups
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.
Re-adjusting intervention thresholds
The new intervention thresholds will be based on the carrier’s safety rating. Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, and HOS Compliance to receive high intervention threshold scores. The vehicle maintenance driver observed category would have a new 65, 75, 80 thresholds 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.
Making violation severity weights simpler
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
The SMS will now be a compilation of 959 + 14 violation data points, increasing from the previous 749 + 5. The new system will also intensely focus on recent violations instead of older ones.
But the violations will be consolidated to 116, making it easier to manage your scores and identify improvement areas.
A percentile jump won’t be when a carrier moves to a new safety event group.
There won’t be a percentile jump when you move to a new safety event group. That means 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 significantly focus on recent violations
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. The portal is available at https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/smsportal
Conclusion
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.
