Toward the end of last summer, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration released an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) to gather feedback on potential changes to its carrier safety rating system, dubbed its “safety fitness determination” rule.
In January, the agency issued a notice to alert stakeholders that it may consider a handful of reports and studies in developing a proposed or final rule. The notice of data availability (NODA) linked to six reports/studies that FMCSA said it “may consider in responding to the public comments on the issues raised and questions posed" in the advance notice.
All six reports/studies are available in the docket report here. Four of the six are related to the impact of in-cab technology on safety in trucking, possibly indicating that FMCSA is considering tying in the use of safety technologies to safety fitness determinations. A fifth report looks at the impact of federal carrier compliance reviews in reducing crashes. The final report is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) coding and validation manual released in 2023.
Only five comments were filed on the NODA, and one of those was withdrawn. There was some support for a close look at all the data, detailed below, yet the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association reflected other groups' commentary that the information in the reports and studies “should not be relied upon by the agency in developing a proposed or final rule. We believe the studies contain various flaws that limit their findings."
The association worried that the reports might be "used as a basis to incorporate the adoption and use of safety technologies" in any new SFD methodology, and urged strongly against that in particular.
One study, a close look at in-cab video-monitoring systems published in 2017, showed that the participating drivers experienced the greatest reduction in “risky driving behaviors” when driver coaching was combined with instant driver feedback from in-cab technology. OOIDA noted, however, that the study did not describe very well what “risky driving” was, “neither was it correlated with actual crashes.”
[Related: FMCSA making a run at revamp to carrier safety rating system]
