The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), together with its state partners and the trucking industry, are working to further reduce commercial motor vehicle (CMV) crashes, injuries and fatalities on our nation's highways.  To this end, the FMCSA implemented the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program in December of 2010.  CSA introduces a new enforcement and compliance model that allows FMCSA to identify high-risk motor carriers, as well as individual drivers, and intervene in ways that work to reduce high-risk behaviors and impact safety.  The CSA initiative applies to all vehicles over 10,000 lbs. that travel interstate or haul hazardous materials, both for-hire and private fleets. Its purpose is to identify behavioral and safety problems, and intervene by way of warning letters and investigations. The FMCSA will then monitor those carriers for improvements.

The Safety Measurement System (SMS) methodology, one of the tools that measure the safety of motor carriers, was developed to support the CSA initiative.  SMS quantifies on-road safety performance of carriers and drivers to identify candidates for interventions, determine the specific safety problems that a carrier or driver exhibits and then monitor whether safety problems are improving or worsening.  SMS assesses a carrier’s safety performance on the basis of its roadside inspection violations and crashes while using a subset of these to evaluate an individual driver’s safety performance across employers.  By including individual drivers in the assessments, a driver with a poor safety background will be detected even as he/she changes companies.  SMS has replaced SafeStat in the new operational model and uses a motor carrier’s data from the previous 24 months of roadside inspections and state-reported motor vehicle crashes to quantify performance in seven different categories. 

 

These categories make up the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC). All BASIC assessments are publically available online except for two - the Cargo-Related and Crash Indicator BASICs. FMSCA maintains that SMS is used to prioritize motor carriers for safety interventions, but are not meant to be safety ratings. The BASICs are as follows:

 

 

While the FMCSA believes the BASIC scores are helping to identify unsafe carriers and drivers, others in the industry are not in total agreement on the methodology behind the scores. In June of 2012, the American Trucking Association (ATA) called on the FMCSA to release the study used to develop the CSA scoring system.  Another recent study by The Alliance for Safe, Efficient, and Competitive Truck Transportation group showed that there was no correlation between CSA BASIC data and actual crash performance. The FMCSA does caution that SMS results are not intended to imply any federal safety rating of a carrier and conclusions should not be drawn based on data in the system alone. FMSCA encourages frequent review by motor carriers of the SMS and to initiate any correction requests through DataQs, their online electronic data correcting system. The SMS was designed and intended to be continually improved. To that end, in March of 2012, the FMCSA announced several improvements to the system, which will be rolled out in December 2012. For a complete listing of the scheduled improvements, click here.

To date, insurance companies and underwriters are placing varying levels of importance on CSA/SMS scores when determining whether to quote an account and the impact on pricing.  One long-standing commercial transportation carrier uses CSA/SMS data to determine if they will offer coverage to a motor carrier, but noted that loss history is still the most important factor.  Furthermore, they put equal weight on all SMS scores and look closely at the data to analyze why particular scores were received in each category.  An underwriter from that company advised, “We use SMS as a tool, not an end all. It’s just one of the many things we look at.  If a carrier has alerts in all categories with high percentages, they could be in jeopardy of having their authority revoked and as such our willingness to offer a quote is small.”

 

Insurance companies weigh this public data in terms of being “defendable” in court, should an accident occur and end up at trial. Shippers are also reviewing the SMS in order to determine which motor carriers to utilize for their business needs. In severe cases, if a motor carrier ignores interventions and does not comply with DOT rules, regulations, severe SMS alerts and warning letters, the DOT could revoke a motor carrier’s authority. Investing time and money in understanding the SMS and BASICs in CSA, and ultimately overall safety, will have a positive impact on insurance costs and could also attract shippers wishing to work with the “safest” motor carriers.