Since February, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has been fielding public comments on proposed changes to its CSA Safety Measurement System (SMS) carrier scoring system. That comment period closed last week with just 176 comments filed to the docket after a period during which carriers were invited to preview how the changes might affect their scores.
Overall, trucking groups were generally in favor of the proposed changes, while also noting more could be done to improve the system. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, however, said it was “disappointed that the agency’s proposed modifications to CSA/SMS fall short of the comprehensive systemic overhauls needed to accurately identify at-risk carriers and reduce truck crashes.”
Likewise, attorney Hank Seaton, filing comments on behalf of a number of trucking and freight organizations, including the National Association of Small Trucking Companies, among others, said the proposed changes will not improve accuracy and fairness to prioritize carriers for safety enforcement like FMCSA claims. Instead, “it will carry forward the major statistical and legal flaws of the old version, and in fact will prejudice the ability of small carriers to obtain sufficient SMS data -- good or bad -- to be accurately measured,” he said.
Seaton added that what is required to fix the system is “not a mere reboot of SMS but a complete re-do of the agency’s system for making safety fitness determinations.”
[Related: Fit or unfit? FMCSA keying in on problems with 'Conditional' safety rating limbo]
The proposed changes include reorganizing the current categories of measurement, renaming them simply “safety categories,” to better identify specific problems. The agency also proposed to combine the current 959 violations used in SMS, plus 14 additional violations not currently used, into 116 new violation groups.
The American Trucking Associations said it supports the proposal to reorganize the categories, but suggested that FMCSA instead refer to them as “Compliance Categories” to further simplify the terminology, in line with how the SMS was originally conceived -- a way to measure relative regulatory compliance through which state enforcement departments and the agency itself could prioritize investigatory work.
