Legal Research

This month, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) launched its new Comprehensive Safety Analysis (CSA) 2010 program. The program assigns safety ratings to motor carriers.  This new program is significant because the Safety Measurement System (SMS) calculation of the safety rating of a motor carrier is based on driver assessments including roadside inspection violations, accidents, and tickets. SMS replaces and goes well beyond the previous program (SafeStat).

 

SMS will assess a carrier's safety performance by using these Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories called BASICs: Unsafe Driving, Fatigued Driving (Hours-of-Service), Driver Fitness, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Vehicle Maintenance, Cargo-Related, and Crash Indicator. Each BASIC category has a violation table with a severity rating for each violation. A logistical conversion then measures the motor carrier into a percentile placement when compared to peers.

The calculations of the conversions are extremely complicated. Each BASIC category has a separate violation table with a severity rating assigned for each violation. Also, each BASIC is measured differently with a different equation. An excellent presentation of these calculations is found in the Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology at http://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/sms/HelpFiles/SMSMethodology.pdf.

Also, there are two excellent resources that offer insight and advice for both drivers and motor carriers. See www.dotjobhistory.com or www.csa2010.com.

The violation tables, including the severity rating and the Federal Regulation number for each violation, will appear in the 2011 MVR Access and Decoder Digest.