
The plaintiff coalition charges that FMCSA shirked several responsibilities to broker, shipper and carrier communities with its Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, which it views as constituting a “new legislative rule issued not in accordance with law and without observance of” required procedure for such rules, among other particular charges in the filed petitioners’ brief.
Download a copy of the full brief summarizing all issues here.
At issue is guidance FMCSA published on its website in May 2012 for users of its public Safety Measurement System (SMS) for motor carriers that, ASECTT and others party to the suit contend, encouraged a view of SMS results as constituting reliable indicators of motor carrier safety and sanctioned the use of SMS results for business decisions, such as a broker’s and/or shipper’s selection of a carrier. This was in spite of “numerous logical and statistical flaws [in the SMS] that misrepresent the safety performance of motor carriers,” the brief alleges, as well as a lack of consideration that the system’s methodology “inflicts disproportionate harm on small carriers.”