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Source: fmcsa.dot.gov
The trucking industry has long been skeptical of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) scoring program created by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in 2010. Designed to hold motor carriers and drivers accountable for maintaining safety on the road, CSA scores have been criticized by carriers since their inception for misrepresenting their safety performance and negatively influencing their success based on an imperfect scoring system. In fact, CSA scoring has been a top 10 industry concern for eight of the past nine years according to research conducted by the American Transportation Research Institute.
The FMCSA hopes to improve the reliability of its CSA scores and better identify motor carriers in need of safety interventions with new proposed changes to the Safety Measurement System (SMS) used to calculate carrier safety scores. The FMCSA first proposed changes to the SMS in February 2023 before undergoing a 90-day public review period. The FMCSA addressed feedback received from trucking industry stakeholders and announced further adjustments to the SMS in November 2024.
While a date has not yet been provided for when these proposed changes to the SMS will go into effect, we’ve provided a breakdown of each change and how it will impact carrier CSA scores.
What Is the FMCSA Safety Measurement System?
The SMS was introduced as part of the CSA program to identify high-risk motor carriers. The system analyzes safety data from roadside inspections, crash records and investigations to generate percentile scores for motor carriers in specific safety categories to indicate how they are performing relative to their peers.
CSA scores generated using the SMS also guide the FMCSA in prioritizing which carriers need further safety investigations and enforcement as part of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. Enacted in 2015, the FAST Act requires the FMCSA to conduct a review of motor carriers that demonstrate they are among the highest-risk carriers for at least four consecutive months.
What Prompted the Changes to the SMS?
While the FMCSA has periodically updated the SMS over the years, many motor carriers believe the system does not provide an accurate representation of safety, partly because it does not give credit for “clean” inspections in which no violations were found or for crashes that were clearly not the fault of the motor carrier.
Due to the ongoing criticism, Congress demanded in 2017 that the FMCSA commission an independent study of the SMS to identify and correct issues with how CSA scores are calculated. The study was conducted by the National Academy of Sciences, which recommended a new statistical model for calculating scores called Item Response Theory, or IRT. While the FMCSA ultimately decided an IRT model did not perform well in identifying motor carriers for safety interventions, it did gain valuable insight for SMS improvements during the testing phase that could help it and motor carriers better pinpoint and address safety issues.
Breakdown of Proposed Changes
According to the FMCSA, the proposed changes to the SMS aim to better identify the companies needing the most intervention and to help companies better understand how to use CSA scores and safety data to influence safer behaviors on the road.
NOTE: The FMCSA has not yet announced a time frame for the rollout of the below changes.
Renamed and Reorganized Safety Categories
Current Methodology: The SMS assesses motor carrier on-road performance and compliance by organizing safety data into seven categories known as BASICs (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories). The BASICs are as follows:
- Unsafe Driving
- Crash Indicator
- Hours of Service (HOS) Compliance
- Vehicle Maintenance
- Controlled Substances/Alcohol
- Hazardous Materials (HM) Compliance
- Driver Fitness
Proposed Change #1: The BASICs are being renamed and will now be called “compliance categories.” According to the FMCSA, the new name is meant to simplify discussion around safety and compliance and emphasize the connection between the categories and crash risks.
Proposed Change #2: The compliance categories have also been restructured based on the FMCSA’s findings and will now be as follows:
- Unsafe Driving
- Crash Indicator
- HOS Compliance
- Vehicle Maintenance
- Vehicle Maintenance: Driver Observed
- HM Compliance
- Driver Fitness
Controlled Substances/Alcohol violations and operating while out-of-service (OOS) violations have been rolled into the Unsafe Driving compliance category. The FMCSA found that controlled substances and alcohol violations were strongly associated with unsafe driving, as were violations for operating under an OOS order. OOS violations were previously included in the Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Hours of Service or Vehicle Maintenance BASICs based on the underlying violation.
Vehicle Maintenance has been broken into two separate compliance categories to provide greater specificity for motor carriers. This was necessary because Vehicle Maintenance is the largest BASIC in terms of both the number of violation identifiers and the number of violations cited during inspections.
- The revised Vehicle Maintenance compliance category will include maintenance violations commonly identified by a mechanic doing routine maintenance or as part of a full Level I roadside inspection.
- Vehicle Maintenance: Driver Observed will include violations that could be observed by a driver or detected as part of a Walk-Around Level II roadside inspection.
Consolidation of Roadside Violations Into Violation Groups
Current Methodology: Motor carriers are assessed based on more than 950 possible roadside violations.
Proposed Change: The existing violations will be reorganized into 116 violation groups of similar safety behaviors to prevent inconsistencies that occur when multiple violations are cited for a single or very similar underlying issue. However, any of the existing violations can still be cited during a roadside inspection.
If a carrier receives more than one of the violations in a violation group during a single inspection, the new SMS methodology will treat the set of violations as a single violation. The FMCSA believes that grouping violations increases fairness by focusing on the presence of a safety issue rather than the number of ways it’s documented.
Simplified Violation Severity Weights
Current Methodology: Each roadside violation is assigned a severity weight on a scale of 1 to 10 that reflects its relationship to crash occurrence and/or crash consequences.
Proposed Change: Violations will be assigned a severity weight of either 1 or 2. Severity weights will be applied to the newly consolidated violation groups instead of individual violations. During its study, the FMCSA determined that assigning customized weights to all violations was not as important as noting that the violation occurred. The two-value scale was chosen to more easily identify carriers with higher crash rates for intervention prioritization and make it clearer why a specific violation is weighted more heavily than others.
Violation groups with OOS violations or driver-disqualifying violations will receive a severity weight of 2. If none of the violations in a violation group are OOS or driver-disqualifying violations, the violation group would receive a weight of 1.
Improved Safety Intervention Thresholds
Current Methodology: Carriers may be prioritized for interventions if their CSA score percentiles in a BASIC are at or above certain Intervention Thresholds.
Proposed Changes: The Intervention Thresholds in the Vehicle Maintenance: Driver Observed, Vehicle Maintenance, HM Compliance and Driver Fitness compliance categories will be adjusted to better reflect their relationship to crash rates.
The Vehicle Maintenance and Vehicle Maintenance: Driver Observed compliance categories will have the same thresholds as the current Vehicle Maintenance BASIC:
- 80% for general carriers
- 65% for passenger carriers
- 75% for HM carriers
The Driver Fitness compliance category will have the following Intervention Thresholds:
- 80–90% for general carriers
- 65–75% for passenger carriers
- 75–85% for HM carriers
The HM Compliance category will have an Intervention Threshold of 80–90% for all carrier types.
New Proportionate Percentiles
Current Methodology: Carriers are placed in safety event groups based on the number of inspections and crashes in which they have been involved. For example, carriers with three to 10 driver inspections are compared to each other, while carriers with 11 to 20 driver inspections are compared to each other.
The number of violations and crashes is used to calculate a quantifiable “measure” of a motor carrier’s safety performance. Carriers are then ranked within safety event groups by assigning each carrier in the safety event group a percentile rank that compares its measure to the measure of other carriers in the same safety event group.
Proposed Changes: New “proportionate percentiles” will be used to eliminate large and sudden jumps in percentiles that occur for non-safety-related reasons under the safety event group approach. Proportionate percentiles will use a weighted average based on the exact number of inspections and crashes to assign a percentile for a motor carrier, no longer relying on the cutoffs established by safety event groups.
This new approach will improve the FMCSA’s ability to compare similar carriers and more precisely and accurately indicate how a carrier’s performance is trending from month to month.
Greater Focus on Recent Violations
Current Methodology: Motor carriers receive a CSA score in the HOS Compliance, Vehicle Maintenance, HM Compliance and Driver Fitness BASICs if the last inspection in the past two years resulted in a violation. This means carriers may be prioritized for intervention even if they have no recent violations in these categories.
Carriers are only assigned CSA scores in the Unsafe Driving and Controlled Substance/Alcohol BASICs if they have received at least one roadside violation in those categories in the past 12 months.
Proposed Change: The 12-month time frame will be applied to all compliance categories equally. This means that carriers with no violations in the past 12 months will not receive CSA scores in the affected compliance categories. However, violations from the past 24 months will still be tracked. This change will keep the focus on carriers with recent violations and active compliance issues.
Updated Utilization Factor
Current Methodology: The current Utilization Factor for the SMS ensures that CSA scores in the Unsafe Driving and Crash Indicator BASICs account for carriers’ different levels of exposure to inspections and crashes. The Utilization Factor is currently applied to carriers that drive up to 200,000 vehicles miles traveled (VMT) per average Power Unit (PU) — or a carrier’s VMT per average number of vehicles it has on the road.
Proposed Change: The Utilization Factor will be extended to carriers that drive up to 250,000 VMT per average PU. This will more accurately account for the increased levels of crashes and on-road enforcement that motor carriers with the most VMT per vehicle are exposed to.
New Carrier Segmentation
Current Methodology: In the Unsafe Driving and Crash Indicator BASICS, motor carriers are segmented by whether their company operates primarily straight vehicles or combination vehicles.
Proposed Change: The Driver Fitness compliance category will also now segment carriers by whether their company operates primarily straight vehicles or combination vehicles. For the HM Compliance category, companies will be segmented by cargo tank and non-cargo tank carriers.
Extending carrier segmentation to the Driver Fitness and HM Compliance categories will ensure carriers are fairly compared to others with similar operations and violation patterns.
How Can You Prepare for the SMS Changes?
These new proposed changes to the SMS have the potential to significantly impact the way CSA scores are calculated and how motor carriers are prioritized for safety enforcement by the FMCSA.
An implementation timeline for the new updates will be announced through the Federal Register after the FMCSA finalizes its SMS methodology. In the meantime, carriers are encouraged to visit the FMCSA’s Prioritization Preview website to see how the SMS updates could change their CSA scores once implemented. The FMCSA will also be hosting educational webinars to help carriers understand the upcoming changes.
Carriers should also be evaluating their safety practices in light of the planned changes. If your fleet is in need of maintenance to stay in compliance, Rush Truck Centers can help. We have more than 140 locations nationwide that offer same-day Xpress Service, including preventive maintenance inspections and service for brake systems, aftertreatment, alignment and more. We also offer customized Maintenance Plans that make it easy to manage the ongoing expense of maintaining your vehicles and ensure all manufacturer-required repairs are being completed as recommended.
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