FMCSA has launched FMCSA
FMCSA released a report in 2018 that laid out how the agency planned to proceed in reforming its Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, including a revamp of the SMS.
In its report, NAS agreed that FMCSA’s approach to measuring carrier safety, based on crash prevention rather than prediction, is sound, the agency asserted, though the notice to be published Wednesday makes clear that NAS, as previously reported, urged a variety of improvements to the overall CSA SMS approach. FMCSA's notice focuses on one of six NAS recommendations to FMCSA regarding improvements to the SMS, which was to develop a so-called Item Response Theory (IRT) model to more accurately target at-risk carriers for intervention.
Yet FMCSA is not adopting such a model, as the agency lays out in the notice, rather changes to various aspects of the current SMS that FMCSA Administrator Robin Hutcheson believes will enhance "the fairness, accuracy, and clarity of our prioritization system,” she said.
[Related: Devil's in the data: FMCSA seeks sources, improvements for CSA revamp in public meeting]
When testing an IRT model, FMCSA found “many limitations and practical challenges,” concluding that IRT modeling doesn’t perform well in identifying carriers for safety interventions. Instead, the agency found during the IRT modeling study that certain areas of the SMS “could be improved to better identify high risk carriers for intervention, without the complications inherent in adopting an IRT model.”
As part of those changes, FMCSA proposes to reorganize the current Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs), which will be renamed “safety categories,” to better identify specific problems. To achieve this, FMCSA proposes to combine the current 959 violations used in SMS, plus 14 additional violations not currently used in SMS, into 116 new violation groups.
