CAPITOLGains SFD PROPOSAL FAILS TO DELIVER
Vigillo’s Steve Bryan comments on FMCSA’s recent Safety Fitness Determination proposal
BY STEVE BRYAN Guest Writer EDITED BY STEVE BRAWNER Contributing Writer
Editor’s note: The author was a presenter at a recent trucking association business con- ference. This article is largely a written nar- rative of Mr. Bryan’s presentation. In December 2010, after two years of
testing in selected pilot states, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration began using the Compliance, Safety and Accountability (CSA) program as its new tool for identifying unsafe motor carriers. It also made public a motor carrier’s CSA scores—a percentile view of how well the carrier “performed” against others of simi- lar characteristics. CSA was designed to be a data-driven
system enabling law enforcement to more precisely identify motor carriers who present a higher crash risk, and then prioritize them for heightened scrutiny. With approximately 1,100 FMCSA employees and 15,000 contracted law enforcement personnel tasked with regulatory oversight of over 500,000 motor carriers, CSA was intended to focus those limited resources where the greatest safety impact could be realized. While the strategy of CSA was noble,
and initially had the support of a broad swath of the trucking industry, the execu- tion left much to be desired among many of those early supporters. Concerns were raised, early and often,
regarding CSA’s accuracy in indicating how safe a carrier was; the fact that “adminis-
34 Issue 3, Fall 2016
“SOME MIGHT HAVE ASSUMED THAT FMCSA WOULD
HOLD OFF ON ISSUING THE PROPOSED SFD RULE UNTIL THOSE DEFECTS WERE ADDRESSED. THOSE PEOPLE WOULD HAVE BEEN WRONG.”
—STEVE BRYAN, CEO OF VIGILLO
trative” types of violations in one category could carry the same severity weighting as a more egregious “unsafe behavior” viola- tion in another; and, that all crashes—even those deemed non-preventable—were counted against a carrier. Despite the objections, the agency
continued to push the program forward, making periodic tweaks to the methodology, but not addressing the underlying concerns. Eleven days after the CSA program
began, the agency began socializing a new concept that would redefine the “safety rat- ing” process, which ultimately allows trucking companies to operate—or not. Under the existing process, safety rat-
ings fall into three categories: satisfactory, conditional, or unsatisfactory, and are largely if not solely derived from on-site Compliance Reviews (CRs). But with a ratio of almost 500 motor carriers for every one FMCSA employee, very few CRs are actually conducted. This has led to the majority of the industry being classified as “unrated,” and many carriers having had
the same “satisfactory” rating for years with little or no interaction with FMCSA. Enter the Safety Fitness
Determination (SFD). In January, five full years after CSA
launched, a new SFD rulemaking was finally proposed by the FMCSA. The proposal introduced a single rat-
ing of “unfit,” replacing the previous three categories. So, carriers would be assumed to be operating in compliance, i.e. “satisfac- torily,” but there would be no public indica- tion as such, until or unless the carrier fell out of compliance, at which time the “unfit” label would be applied. Motor carriers could find themselves
unfit through one of three different meth- ods under the SFD proposal:
Unfit Method 1: Carrier with two or more failed BASICs from On-Road Safety Performance A reminder for readers that BASICs are the seven categories into which FMCSA grouped similar violations at the start of the CSA program. This method ties directly into and makes the most use of CSA data.
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