Complying with Congressional statute, FMCSA submits plan to reform CSA

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Updated Aug 19, 2018

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced Tuesday it has filed a report with Congress detailing reforms it plans to institute to the Compliance, Safety, Accountability carrier safety rating program. The 10-page report was made public by the agency in July. Overdrive covered the report’s contents then, at this link. Of note, the agency says it plans to begin testing a new scoring system for CSA’s Safety Measurement System next month.

FMCSA was required by Congress by the 2015 FAST Act highway bill to pull CSA’s public SMS percentile rankings from public view and to contract the National Academies of Science to study the program and make recommendations as to how to make it more accurate and fair in its assessment of motor carriers’ risk of future crashes. The FAST Act also required FMCSA to formulate a so-called corrective action plan based on NAS’ recommendations and to file that plan with Congress. The agency satisfied that Congressional directive Tuesday, it said.

The agency also announced it will be holding a public meeting about the report on Aug. 29 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Eastern in Arlington, Virginia. Those interested in participating can attend in person or attend via an online webinar. The meeting will be held at FMCSA’s National Training Center: 1310 N. Courthouse Road, Suit 600, Arlington, VA 22201. Interested participants can register to attend either in person or via the webinar at fmcsa.dot.gov/fastact/csa.

At the meeting, FMCSA will solicit feedback and input from industry stakeholders about how it can implement the reforms spelled out in the corrective action plan. According to the agency’s report, chief reforms include altering how carriers’ scores are calculated, improving the quality of data used to score carriers, making it easier for carriers to understand and calculate their safety scores and evaluating adding an absolute scoring system, instead of relying solely on relative scores that compare carriers to their peers.

To read more about the agency’s plan to fix CSA, see Overdrive‘s coverage of its report from last month.

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