The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has just started inviting comments on proposed changes to its important Safety Measurement System (SMS) for commercial trucks and fleets. The SMS currently assesses which motor carriers pose the greatest risk to safety through data collected from roadside inspections, crash reports, and investigations. They then use the data for the purpose of intervention.
Some of the proposed changes include reorganizing the SMS’s safety categories (currently known as “BASICs”); organizing roadside violations into violation groups for prioritization purposes; simplifying violation severity weights; adjusting some of the Intervention Thresholds that identify companies for possible intervention; along with more changes aimed at comparing similar motor carriers to each other. Those, and other, proposed changes will enhance “the fairness, accuracy, and clarity of our prioritization system,” according to FMCSA Administrator Robin Hutcheson.
To preview how your carrier data would look, visit the all-new Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) Prioritization Preview website, then take a few minutes to read this CCJ article by Matt Cole explaining the proposed changes. You can also review the formal proposed change document and comment on proposed changes until May 16.
