The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s proposed operational model for its Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 assesses carriers for fitness continually based on data updated every month, and allows for early and progressive intervention.

Imagine you have dozens of kids. There’s no way to watch them all at all times. To some extent, you must hope they are doing what they are supposed to until proven otherwise. And even when they do engage in minor misconduct, you have little choice but to ignore them until they do something that’s really bad. You just don’t have the time. So you end up pegging some kids as troublemakers and focusing your efforts on them. Meanwhile, the others don’t get much discipline for their bad habits and so become the new troublemakers.

In some ways, that’s what it’s like to be the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. On the one hand, FMCSA has limited personnel and budgets. On the other, it’s responsible for overseeing the safety of tens of thousands of motor carriers and hundreds of thousands of truck drivers. Where do you start?

A little more than 20 years ago, FMCSA took its first steps toward a systematic approach when it instituted the compliance review and the resulting safety ratings – satisfactory, conditional and unsatisfactory. For years, this process was fairly haphazard with an audit being triggered mainly by obvious worries, such as a complaint or one or more fatal accidents. In the late 1990s, FMCSA formulated SafeStat – a data-driven, performance-based algorithm used to identify potentially high-risk motor carriers.

By assigning scores based on accidents, driver and vehicle inspection history and past safety management, SafeStat helps FMCSA decide which carriers to target for compliance reviews. But today, FMCSA has the resources to audit only about 2 percent of motor carriers. So only high-risk carriers get real attention.

Then, the carrier gets lots of attention, of course. Investigators arrive for an intensive on-site look at pretty much everything. Regardless of what specific problems a carrier has, auditors follow a manual for conducting audits, guaranteeing that they are an ordeal.

You can’t assess payback of any system just by looking at resources consumed. If prospects for continued safety improvements are great, then perhaps the system isn’t broke. But that’s not what FMCSA was seeing several years ago. Since data gathering began, the fatal accident rate involving large trucks peaked in 1979 at a little more than six fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT).