The comment period for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s proposed changes to the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program closed last week, and several major trucking organizations and companies weighed in.
The FMCSA is proposing to take yet another BASIC score public, one of several changes it’s proposing for the Safety Measurement System, which the agency uses to measure the safety of motor carriers and prioritize carriers for intervention actions.
In addition to taking the hazmat BASIC public, the agency wants to lower the interventional threshold of the vehicle maintenance BASIC to 75 percent from its current 80 percent, thus targeting more carriers, and raise the intervention threshold of the controlled substances BASIC to 90 percent from its current 80 percent, thus targeting fewer carriers.
Here’s a look at some of the comments that were submitted:
American Trucking Associations: ATA says FMCSA is missing an opportunity to improve safety with the proposed rule.
“After having a year to consider the recommendation from the National Transportation Safety Board-requested Independent Review Team to distinguish form and manner violations from those that cause crashes, FMCSA appears to have dismissed it out of hand,” said Rob Abbott, ATA Vice President of Safety Policy. “We find this very troubling because the agency is missing an opportunity to improve safety by placing more focus on high-risk carriers.”
