The head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said in future years, the agency may consider driver safety ratings in its Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 program and could have a fifth hours-of-service listening session next month.
In a Feb. 5 speech to the Mid-West Truckers Association Annual Convention, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said CSA uses driver violation data to help target interventions with carriers using unsafe drivers. “We are not at this time proposing to issue ‘safety ratings’ for drivers or to disqualify a driver based on our CSA 2010 scoring system” Ferro said. “We may consider that at some point after the program has matured but it is not part of what we are doing at this point.”
The agency and its state partners conduct 17,000 on-site, comprehensive compliance reviews annually. Under CSA, officials could rate safety performances of 175,000 to 200,000 carriers on a continual basis using roadside inspection, crash and investigation data.
The FMCSA may offer a fifth HOS listening session in March. Four hundred people attended previous sessions and hundreds more participated by phone and the Internet. Comments are still being accepted by mail, email and fax and how-to information is available on the agency website.
On driver fatigue, a final rule is pending that would require electronic on-board recorders to address the problem, Ferro said.
