FMCSA’s top priority is safety. Since 2010, the Agency’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program has worked successfully to make the nation’s roads safer for everyone. As part of this commitment to nationwide safety, FMCSA continually identifies ways to advance the efficiency and effectiveness of its safety programs, including its Safety Measurement System (SMS).
In this spirit, FMCSA published a notice in the Federal Register proposing enhancements to the SMS to improve its ability to prioritize and intervene with motor carriers that pose the greatest safety risk. These enhancements to SMS allow us to sharpen our focus on carriers with high crash rates, more effectively identify driver safety problems and Hazardous Materials (HM) carriers with serious safety problems, and more accurately account for carriers that are driving on our roads the most. These enhancements are based on results from the Agency’s SMS Effectiveness Test and input from industry, enforcement, and other safety stakeholders.
The proposed SMS enhancements include:
- Changing some of the SMS Intervention Thresholds to better reflect the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories’ (BASICs) correlation to crash risk.
- Segmenting the HM Compliance BASIC by cargo tank (CT) and non-CT carriers.
- Reclassifying violations for operating while out-of-service (OOS) as under the Unsafe Driving BASIC, rather than the BASIC of the underlying OOS violation.
- Increasing the maximum Vehicle Miles Traveled used in the Utilization Factor to more accurately reflect operations of high-utilization carriers.
Share Your Input
FMCSA encourages everyone to review and comment on the proposed SMS enhancements in the Federal Register Notice. The 30-day comment period will end on July 29, 2015. You can submit written comments on the proposed changes to the Federal Docket Management System, Docket ID Number FMCSA-2015-0149-0001. After reviewing comments received, FMCSA will announce the preview of the proposed enhancements to SMS in a second Federal Register Notice. Submit your comments on the Federal Register Notice here.
FMCSA is committed to continually improving SMS, in a thoughtful, methodical, and transparent manner, to ensure that it continues to aid in carrying out our critical safety mission. Visit the SMS Website to check out current SMS results, and subscribe to our mailing list to stay updated on the proposed SMS enhancements and the latest CSA news.
