FMCSA to use new approach on safety scores

From Transport Topics.

The top attorney for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said the agency is moving forward with plans in support of recommendations by a panel of elite academics for a new approach to measuring motor carrier safety scores.

“We at FMCSA have been waiting for this study for 18 months,” Randi Hutchinson, chief counsel for FMCSA, told Transport Topics in a June 29 interview. “We accept it. That’s what we’re moving toward.”

Hutchinson, recently named to the chief counsel post, said the agency is “taking the recommendations to heart” and the agency “intends to immediately start working on them. We have 120 days to prepare an action plan that we will then present to Congress and to the office of the inspector general.”

The study, fashioned by a 12-member panel of academics chosen by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, concluded that FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program’s controversial Safety Measurement System to identify motor carriers at high risk for future crashes is “conceptually sound” but several features need improvement.

While the panel’s report was complimentary of the agency for many of its ideas and efforts, it recommended that over the next two years, regulators develop a more “statistically principled approach” based on an “item response theory” — that is, a more detailed data-oriented approach that digs deeper and measures the performance of individual trucks and buses, not just at the motor carrier level.

You can review the study online See the full story from Transport Topics online.