Addressing concerns raised by the American Trucking Associations and other industry groups earlier this summer about the design of Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 (CSA 2010), the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced updates to the Safety Management System methodology to better identify carriers deemed “high risk” or otherwise have safety compliance problems.
Most notably, the measure of exposure will be changed from Power Units only to a combination of Power Units and Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) in the Unsafe Driving BASIC and Crash Indicator. In addition, these two BASICs will change from using Power Units as a safety event grouping (formerly referred to as peer grouping) to using the number of crashes for the Crash Indicator and the number of inspections with a violation for the Unsafe Driving BASIC.
According to FMCSA’s CSA 2010 website, other updates to the SMS include:
- The measure of exposure will change from Power Units to the number of relevant inspections in the Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC;
- Severity weights for some roadside inspection violations will be updated; and
- The Agency will employ a more strategic approach to addressing motor carriers with a history of size and weight violations rather than counting these violations in the Cargo-Related BASIC; the new approach will include alerts to roadside inspectors when carriers have a history of size and weight violations.
FMCSA also announced that beginning August 16, the CSA 2010 Data Preview Website will soon provide carriers with an assessment of where they stand in each of the SMS’s seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) so they can understand and address their safety compliance issues right away. The seven BASICs – which replace SafeStat’s Safety Evaluation Areas (SEAs) in December 2010 – are Unsafe Driving, Fatigued Driving (Hours-of-Service), Driver Fitness, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Vehicle Maintenance, Cargo-Related and Crash Indicator. For additional details about the Data Preview and the improvements to the SMS, visit: http://csa2010.fmcsa.dot.gov/Documents/SMSImprovementsFAQs.pdf
