Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement (2017) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 11-22
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From page 11... ...
FMCSA uses information that is collected on the frequency of approximately 900 different violations of safety regulations discovered during (mainly) roadside inspections to assess motor carriers' compliance with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations (FMCSRs)
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From page 12... ...
, a population that is heavily skewed by carrier size, ranging from those with a single motor vehicle to those with tens of thousands of vehicles. Owner-operator companies account for 44 percent of the active motor carriers.
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From page 13... ...
Then, within these groupings, the BASIC measures for carriers are ranked from low to high, and each carrier is assigned its resulting percentile rank, which is the rank converted to a percentile between 0 and 100. High BASIC percentiles -- indicating that a carrier was worse than a large percentage of similarly sized carriers -- result in an intervention, with the overall goal being to incentivize carriers to adopt safe practices that will reduce their frequency of serious crashes in the future.
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From page 14... ...
The resulting expert panel, the Panel on the Review of the Compliance, Safety, and Accountability Program of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, was convened in March 2016, and was charged by this congressional mandate to evaluate the accuracy and sufficiency of the data used by SMS, and to assess whether other approaches to identifying unsafe carriers would identify high-risk carriers more effectively. In addition, the panel was asked to examine the effectiveness of the use of the percentile ranks produced by SMS for identifying high-risk carriers, and if not, what alternatives might be preferred, and to reflect on how members of the public use the SMS and what effect making the SMS information public has had on reducing crashes.
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From page 15... ...
(h) How members of the public use the SMS and what effect mak ing the SMS information public has had on reducing crashes and eliminating unsafe motor carriers from the industry.
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From page 16... ...
The seventh BASIC, referred to as the Crash Indicator BASIC, is a weighted crash frequency, where the weights are time weights and crash severity weights. Then, within groups of similarly sized carriers, referred to as safety event groups, the carriers are ranked from low to high for each BASIC, and the percentile ranks (expressed between 0 and 100%)
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From page 17... ...
FMCSA identifies carriers engaging in observable behaviors that have been shown to be associated with future crash risk, and it intervenes with those carriers to encourage them to adopt safer practices in the hopes of reducing future crashes. The objective of FMCSA's SMS is to identify carriers that are giving too little priority to behaviors and practices indicative of safety performance.
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From page 18... ...
. Stratification of SMS in Addition to Safety Event Groups: Besides safety event groups, which as we have noted are essentially based on carrier size, the only formal stratification that SMS makes use of is the stratification of the carrier population into carriers where, for truck carriers, more than 70 percent of the trucks are "combination" as opposed to "straight," with a related stratification for motorcoach carriers.
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From page 19... ...
They are used to give additional weight to violations that are more closely associated with future crash risk. Severity weights and violation coding have been criticized, since essentially equivalent violations can be assigned to different violation codes, which can result in severity weights that can differ by two or more times, depending on the specific violation codes cited.
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From page 20... ...
Making Percentile Ranks Public: Until recently, the SMS measures for the BASICs except for Hazardous Materials Compliance and Crash Indicators were made public, as were the percentile ranks. However, as part of the FAST Act, those percentile ranks are not released for propertycarrying motor carriers.
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From page 21... ...
Further, it discusses whether SMS percentile ranks should be made public, and the benefits of transparency of SMS or alternatives. Chapter 4 contains the details of the IRT model as it could apply to motor carrier safety, starting with its conceptual basis and continuing through its technical description.
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