FMCSA Withdraws Preview for Updating SMS Scores

On July 16, 2018, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) published notice in the Federal Register that it will not complete proposed enhancements to the Agency’s Safety Measurement System (SMS) website, and that it was withdrawing a preview version of those enhancements from public view. The Agency initially undertook improvements to the SMS system in July 2015, including changes to the thresholds used to target “high-risk” motor carriers, making the Hazmat Compliance BASIC score public, placing violations for operating while out-of-service in the Unsafe Driving BASIC, and increasing the maximum vehicles miles traveled statistic to allow the agency to better reflect operations of carriers with high utilization.

However, Congress intervened in these proposed changes with legislation requiring review of the program by the National Academies of Science (NAS). The 2015 Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act required that the FMCSA remove the percentile rankings of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) carrier scoring program from public view until the NAS completed an examination of the program’s statistical models. The NAS report, released in 2017, recommended significant adjustments to the CSA scoring formulas and recommended using different statistical models to determine carrier safety ratings.

Following the NAS report, the FMCSA has determined that its proposed 2015 reforms would conflict with the recommendations of the National Academies. FMCSA has not indicated a timeline for when it might move forward with broader reforms of the statistical models for the CSA program and SMS. Removing the SMs preview from public view

To view the Federal Register notice, please click here. For more information, contact TIA Advocacy at advocacy@tianet.org or 703-299-5700.