Since August 2017, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has allowed motor carriers to use its DataQs system to submit crashes for evaluation of whether the crashes were preventable or not. In 2020, FMCSA went live with a permanent Crash Preventability Determination Program (CPDP) in which crashes deemed not preventable would be removed from use in a carrier’s Crash Indicator Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category (BASIC) percentile ranking in the CSA Safety Measurement System.
According to FMCSA, between May 1, 2020, and Dec. 30, 2022, nearly 40,000 DataQs requests in this crash-review program were submitted to the agency. Approximately 72.5% of the submitted requests were eligible, meaning they were one of 16 specific crash types that could be deemed not preventable. Approximately 96% of the eligible crashes were found to have been not preventable.
FMCSA is now proposing to change some of the 16 existing crash types and add four new types to expand the program "to review even more crashes each year for preventability.” FMCSA said the proposed changes are expected to double the size of the current CPDP and provide more data for analysis of the impacts of a carrier’s not preventable crashes on its overall safety. The agency would analyze these changes to existing crash types and new crash types for two years, but may announce changes earlier if certain crash types cannot be consistently reviewed or if there is insufficient information to make eligibility and preventability determinations, FMCSA noted.
The agency hoped the changes as they flowed into the Safety Measurement System itself might "allow us to further refine our prioritization to ensure the carriers and drivers with riskiest behaviors are identified for prioritization,” FMCSA said in a Federal Register notice that will publish Thursday. FMCSA also said it believed more preventability information would make for better assessments of motor carriers' actual crash risk.
[Related: Preventable, or not: How to DataQ for FMCSA’s crash review program]
FMCSA is proposing changes to 11 of the 16 current crash types, which can be seen on page 10 of this notice. The proposed revised crash types are in cases where a truck was struck because:
FMCSA said the 11th change “would create a separate [crash] type for these events” involving non-motorists. Such crashes are the predominant type submitted in the current “Rare and Unusual” crash category. FMCSA said the “change will allow the agency to distinguish these events and use the information to identify ways to reduce the increasing number of non-motorist crashes.”
