The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) recently ended the plan to enhance its Safety Management System.
Annually, there are approximately 100,000 fatal and injury crashes involving large trucks and buses in the United States, according to a Consensus Study Report. FMSCA is tasked with reducing crashes, injuries, fatalities involving large trucks and buses, using information collected during roadside inspections that assess motor carriers’ compliance with federal safety regulations.
The recent FMCSA decision ends the administration’s plan to segment the Hazardous Materials Compliance Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (HM BASIC) into cargo tank and noncargo tank carriers and releasing motor carrier percentile rankings to the public. Other proposed changes now discarded included changing thresholds to better reflect correlation to crash risk, reclassifying violations for operating while Out of Service, and increasing the maximum vehicle miles traveled to more accurately reflect the operations of high-utilization carriers.
The National Academy of Sciences is required under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act to report on any proposed changes. The academy’s report did not find that the changes would be a better predictor of carrier safety.
“Because tank carriers usually have lower HM BASIC scores than general freight carriers, this change, if it had been implemented, would have severely and negatively impacted tank carriers’ scores and subjected them to more frequent inspections and compliance reviews,” National Tank Truck Carriers said in a statement. “We are pleased that FMCSA chose to follow safety science and not to split the HM BASIC into cargo-tank and general freight categories.”