Proposed revisions to the U.S. DOT’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability carrier scoring program — and to how the DOT uses those scores to target carriers deemed at risk for crashes — are being withdrawn, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced Friday in a formal notice. The changes, proposed in July 2015 by FMCSA, sought to better align CSA’s Safety Measurement System BASIC scores with carriers’ risk of being involved in a crash.
However, the proposed reforms are being tabled due to ongoing work by the agency to implement a larger overhaul of the CSA program. Spelled out in a Congressionally mandated report last June, the National Academies of Science recommended that the agency rework the SMS and its underlying statistical model.
FMCSA says the reforms proposed in 2015 conflict with the recommendations issued by the NAS report. The NAS report was required by Congress later the same year, when lawmakers also forced FMCSA to remove CSA’s SMS percentile rankings from public view.
The reforms being withdrawn include:
(1) Changes to the so-called intervention thresholds used by the agency to target carriers deemed at risk of a crash;
(2) Segmenting the Hazmat Compliance BASIC (and making it public);
(3) Switching violations for operating while out of service to the Unsafe Driving BASIC (away from whatever BASIC caused the OOS order); and
(4) Increasing the maximum vehicle miles traveled used in the agency’s calculations to more accurately reflect the operations of high-utilization carriers.
Under the changes, the interventional threshold in the Vehicle Maintenance BASIC would have been lowered to the 75th percentile from the 80th percentile. Potentially, more carriers would have been targeted with warning letters or on-site, focused, comprehensive audits, dit,s, or other investigations. The intervention threshold in the Controlled Substances BASIC would have been raised to the 90th percentile, thus encompassing fewer fleets. It would have maintained the 65th percentile intervention threshold for the BASICs, which the agency says have a stronger correlation to crash risk: Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, and Hours of Service Compliance.
In October 2016, the agency implemented a preview website to show carriers and owner-operators how these changes and other reforms proposed afterward would have affected their scores. The agency said that it took down the preview site on Friday.
FMCSA’s proposals sought to institute changes to improve the existing system. However, the 2017 National Academies of Science report recommended a significant overhaul of the system, starting with the roadside inspection data that feeds the SMS ratings. The report did not discuss how the agency should reconfigure the SMS system. Still, the agency was recommended to scrap its current model for determining ratings and opt for one based on the so-called “item response theory.” NAS said an IRT model would more accurately target high-risk carriers.
The report also recommended that the agency make the scoring system more transparent and easier to understand, and to depart from using relative,carrier-to-carrier comparison-based scoring as the sole means for targeting carriers via safety scores.
FMCSA has not provided a timeline for when it will implement its reforms. However, FMCSA Administrator Ray Martinez told Congress in May that the agency has contracted with the NAS and is developing a reformed CSA program.
Before the NAS issued its report, FMCSA proposed other changes to the CSA system, including raising the minimum number of crashes needed before registering a Crash Indicator BASIC score. In October 2016, the agency proposed to increase that number from two to three crashes. The agency’s Friday announcement did not mention that the proposal was being withdrawn.
Original article provided by: https://www.ccjdigital.com/fmcsa-scraps-2015-proposal-to-alter-csa-to-pursue-larger-reforms-to-program/
