The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is soliciting stakeholder feedback on a recent National Academy of Sciences report, “Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement,” which critiqued the agency’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program.
A public meeting will be held on September 8, 2017, from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., Eastern Time, at the FMCSA National Training Centre in Arlington, VA. Interested parties may register to attend in person or via a webinar. The agenda will be made available in advance of the meeting.
The report was written because FMCSA was mandated under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act to commission a study of its CSA program and Safety Measurement System. The purpose of this study was to analyze the accuracy with which SMS identifies high risk carriers and predicts future crash risk or other safety indicators for motor carriers. It was also to determine the accuracy of other methodologies and data used to determine SMS scores.
The results of the study were released in June. The NAS report concluded that SMS, in its current form, is structured in a reasonable way and its method of identifying motor carriers for alert status is defensible. In addition, NAS agreed that FMCSA’s overall approach, based on crash prevention rather than prediction, is sound. NAS provided FMCSA with six recommendations to improve the system.
FMCSA must now submit an action plan to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
The OIG is required to review the action plan and submit a report to Congress on the responsiveness of the FMCSA’s plan to NAS’s recommendations.
Stakeholders who would like to submit comments are invited to do so by Sept. 27, 2017. Comments may be submitted under Docket Number FMCSA–2017–0226 at the Federal eRulemaking Portal: http:// www.regulations.gov. Follow the online instructions for submitting comments
