By James Jaillet and Todd Dills @trucknewsJJ on June 29, 2015
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published June 29 proposed changes to its Compliance, Safety, Accountability safety program, including lowering some intervention thresholds, raising others and making the program’s hazmat category public.
The agency’s move to make the hazmat category public comes despite calls from the trucking industry, members of Congress and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office to make details within CSA less public. The agency also has proposed segmenting the hazmat compliance category via cargo tank and non-cargo tank carriers. FMCSA safety chief admits lack of crash weighting in CSA unfair to trucking co.’s, doesn’t offer fix FMCSA says the changes will better reflect the correlation between crash risk and rankings in the BASICs within CSA’s Safety Measurement System. FMCSA has also proposed to reclassify violations for operating while out of service to the Unsafe Driving BASIC (from whatever BASIC caused the OOS order) and increasing the maximum vehicle miles traveled used in the utilization factor to more accurately reflect operations of high-utilization carriers, it says.
It will maintain the 65 percent intervention threshold for the BASICs with the strongest correlation with crash risk — unsafe driving, crash indicator and hours-of-service compliance. FMCSA says that, upon study of its BASICs and crash risk correlation, it determined those three BASICs to show the strongest crash risk. It determined the lowest crash risk correlation with the controlled substances/alcohol BASIC, the hazmat compliance BASIC and the driver fitness BASIC.
In addition to the hazmat category changes, the agency wants to lower the interventional threshold of the vehicle maintenance category (BASIC) to 75 percent from its current 80 percent, thus targeting more carriers, and raise the intervention threshold of the controlled substances BASIC to 90 percent from its current 80 percent, thus targeting fewer carriers.
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The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published June 29 proposed changes to its Compliance, Safety, Accountability safety program, including lowering some intervention thresholds, raising others and making the program’s hazmat category public.
