FMCSA Announces Enhancements to Carrier Safety Management System

On Nov. 20, 2024, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) published a notice announcing enhancements to the safety measurement system (SMS) used to identify motor carriers for safety interventions. In addition, this notice addressed comments received in response to its previous notice, “Revised Carrier Safety Management,” which was published in the Federal Register on Feb. 15, 2023.

Background

The SMS is part of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program developed in 2010 to help the FMCSA identify high-risk motor carriers based on inspections and enforcement actions. The program calculates scores in different safety categories that are based on safety data. These safety categories were known as the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs).

On Feb. 15, 2023, the FMCSA proposed changes to its SMS in response to comments it had received regarding accurately identifying unsafe motor carriers. The FMCSA provided the following 12 changes and announced a 90-day preview and comment period for stakeholders:

1. Changing “BASICs/Safety categories” to “compliance categories”;

2. Revising the unsafe driving category;

3. Reorganizing vehicle maintenance;

4. Segmenting driver fitness and hazardous materials (HM) compliance categories;

5. Consolidating violations;

6. Simplifying violation severity weights;

7. Moving from safety event groups to proportionate percentiles;

8. Improving intervention thresholds;

9. Focusing on recent violations;

10. Updating utilization factors;

11. Reorganizing violations; and

12. Increasing SMS updates.

During the 90-day preview and comment period (which ended on May 16, 2023), the FMCSA created a new Prioritization Preview website that allows motor carriers to see what their scores would be under the new system.

Following the comment period, the FMCSA has continued to make the prioritization preview site available to industry and other safety stakeholders so they have ample time to review and understand the impacts of the enhancements.

Next Steps

Motor carriers and drivers should make sure they review these changes and how these changes affect their operations. They should also make sure to watch for more information concerning these changes from the FMCSA. The FMCSA states that more information, including a webinar series addressing the changes, will be available on the prioritization preview website in the coming months. The agency also states there will be a follow-up notice published in the Federal Register that provides the launch date of the enhanced SMS website.