A group of researchers from the National Academies of Science has issued a Congressionally mandated report recommending the U.S. DOT overhaul its Compliance, Safety, Accountability carrier rating system to make it more fair and accurate in its assessment of motor carriers’ safety risk.
Key recommendations from the NAS, who made the report public Tuesday, include:
(1) Reconfiguring the underlying statistical model under CSA’s Safety Measurement System (the percentile ranking categories used to target carriers for intervention) with a so-called item response theory (IRT) model to more accurately target at-risk carriers;
(2) making the scoring system more transparent and easier for carriers to replicate and understand; and
(3) departing from using relative metrics as the sole means for targeting carriers.
The NAS urged further study of the impact of the public display of SMS rankings and said the data used to create the rankings is in need of “immediate attention.” Researchers recommend FMCSA better collaborate with state partners and other data providers to collect more data and higher quality data, specifically related to crash reports and to carriers’ operations (miles traveled, number of power units and more).
The report, dubbed Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement, was called for by Congress in the 2015 FAST Act highway bill. The FAST Act also pulled the SMS’ BASIC percentile rankings from public view. The law stipulated that the NAS must issue recommendations on how the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration can fix the data and methodology issues that have plagued CSA since its 2011 onset — and that FMCSA adopt the recommendations — before the SMS can be made public again.
