As of March 7, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has restored the CSA Safety Measurement System (SMS) “raw data” on its website, making it once again publicly visible.
As reported by U.S. trade media, the agency said it has made the necessary modifications to its Safety Measurement System (SMS) website to make it compliant with the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act.
The FAST Act requires that property carriers’ absolute measures be available to the public. Duane DeBruyne, FMCSA spokesperson, told Heavy Duty Trucking that those measures amount to the “raw data” produced by the agency’s Carrier, Safety, Accountability program and so are “not based on relative comparison to other motor carriers.”
Because the highway bill prohibits the display of property carriers’ relative percentiles, FMCSA pulled that information from public display on December 4, 2015. The agency removed the raw CSA data to allow time to revise its SMS website.
“At this time, those modifications are complete and the SMS website is fully compliant with the FAST Act,” FMCSA said on March 7.
The agency advised that any motor carrier without login credentials for the SMS website may click here for more information on how to obtain a PIN.
Meanwhile, FMCSA announced it is adopting a new “High Risk” motor carrier definition along with investigative procedural changes aimed at enabling investigators “to take more immediate action against carriers with the highest crash risk.”
In its notification, published in the Federal Register for March 7, the agency said the changes are in line with its “continuing efforts to improve CSA.”
FMCSA said that under the new definition, non-passenger (that is, property-carrying) motor carriers are considered “High Risk” if they have two or more of these Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) at or above the 90th percentile for two consecutive months and they have not received an onsite investigation in the previous 18 months: Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator; HOS Compliance, and Vehicle Maintenance.
As for passenger carriers, they are now deemed “High Risk” if they have two or more of those BASICs at or above the 90th percentile for one month and they have not received an onsite investigation in the past 12 months.
FMCSA contends the new definition will identify fewer at-risk carriers, but “this group of carriers will have a higher crash risk than the group of carriers identified under the current ‘High Risk’ definition.”
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