This is the third and final part of the CSA’s Distorted Rankings series, which is part of the broader CSA’s Data Trail series. Click here to see Part 1 of the series, and click here to see Part 2.
One initiative to improve Compliance Safety Accountability scoring was an April 30 draft report issued by the CSA Subcommittee of FMCSA’s Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee. Principle areas of recommendation are as follows:
Violation severity weights
The current weightings given to individual violations in the Safety Measurement System are point values on a scale of 1-10, with 10 the most severe.
A presentation to the subcommittee by Dave Madsen of the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, a chief architect of the SMS, illustrated what he called the “ugly little secret” of the system: It implies “a level of precision that doesn’t exist.” Only broad groupings of violations, in FMCSA’s view, correlate to crash risk statistically. Severity weighting, Madsen said, might be better if simplified to a basic low, medium and high system.
Tests of such a three-tiered system show that “the companies that move in and out” of alert status in the individual categories don’t change much, Madsen said. Nevertheless, the current system has the added problem of contributing to misperceptions about how the SMS works.
