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FMCSA changing how it identifies unsafe carriers

Agency drops IRT as too complex, plans to focus on improving current model

FMCSA wants to simplify how it prioritizes roadside safety interventions. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

WASHINGTON — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration plans to change the way it evaluates trucking company safety by upgrading its current ranking model as opposed to installing a new one.

In a notice to be published Wednesday, FMCSA announced it has determined that an advanced statistical model known as Item Response Theory (IRT) — a model touted by the National Academy of Sciences — is “overly complex,” and therefore the agency would not be using it to regulate carrier safety.

Instead, FMCSA has committed to improving its own Safety Management System (SMS) as the way it labels carriers with the highest crash risk and those not fit to operate.

“Safety is FMCSA’s core mission,” said Robin Hutcheson, the agency’s administrator. “The proposed changes are part of the agency’s continued commitment to enhancing the fairness, accuracy and clarity of our prioritization system.”


FMCSA has been under pressure by Congress to improve how it evaluates carrier safety fitness — with the goal of reducing crashes — after changes were called for in the FAST Act of 2015. The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General increased the pressure in 2019 when it called for FMCSA to expedite improvements.

While analyzing the IRT model as a potential remedy, FMCSA found areas in which SMS could be improved to better identify high-risk carriers “without the complications inherent in adopting an IRT model.”

FMCSA summarized the proposed improvements to SMS as:

  • Reorganized and updated safety categories, including new segmentation.
  • Consolidated violations.
  • Simplified violation severity weights.
  • Proportionate percentiles instead of safety event groups.
  • Improved intervention thresholds.
  • Greater focus on recent violations.
  • Updated utilization factor.

Among the changes, FMCSA plans to reorganize SMS’ seven Behavior Analysis Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC) to better identify specific safety problems and also pare down the 959 violations used in SMS by combining them into 116 violation groups.


For example, in the Driver Fitness BASIC, carriers that operate straight trucks, as opposed to combination tractor-trailers, have much higher violation rates than those that operate combination vehicles, FMCSA found. Therefore, “segmenting the Driver Fitness BASIC into Straight and Combination segments more effectively identifies carriers with higher crash rates in both segments.”

In addition, FMCSA acknowledged that assigning severity weights to violations in SMS on a scale of 1 to 10 “has been criticized as overly subjective.” The agency subsequently found simplifying the severity weights identifies carriers with higher crash rates.

“This change would maintain the safety focus on those violations severe enough to result in an [out-of-service] order while removing the subjectivity and complications of distinguishing each violation by severity on a scale of 1 through 10.”

FMCSA also intends to focus more on recent violations when prioritizing carriers for roadside inspections. If all a carrier’s violations in a particular safety category are 12 months or older, it will not be assigned a percentile in that category.

FMCSA found this change would result in 1,081 carriers no longer having a safety category at or above the threshold for the agency having to intervene and that those carriers had a crash rate 13% lower than the national average.

“Removing carriers with no recent violation in those safety categories would allow the agency to focus its resources on carriers that pose a greater safety risk,” FMCSA stated.

One change FMCSA considered – but would not be proposing – is attempting to account for differences in inspection and violation rates among states, which some have asserted leads to unfair SMS results for carriers operating in high-enforcement states.

However, “applying a model that de-emphasizes enforcement in certain states would disincentivize FMCSA’s…partners from undertaking enforcement initiatives that are intended to address particular safety issues in their states,” FMCSA contends. “FMCSA believes that it should encourage all states to continually raise the bar for safety rather than discounting the safety efforts of certain states.”


Commenting on FMCSA’s proposed changes to SMS, “what surprised us was the foundational nature” of some of the changes, P. Sean Garney, co-director of Scopelitis Transportation Consulting, told FreightWaves.

“It’s going to take some time to understand what impact these changes will have on the regulated community,” Garney said. “Ultimately, the mark of success for any of these changes is how it impacts crash rate. Time will tell.”

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, in contrast, is critical of the changes FMCSA is proposing and believes the agency should be putting its resources elsewhere.

“The overwhelming majority of data the agency collects and analyzes has no connection to crashes – none,” commented OOIDA President Todd Spencer. “The cause of highway safety would be best served by the agency moving ahead swiftly with the Large Truck Safety Causal factors study authorized by Congress. You never fix any problem without a clear understanding of what caused it.”

FMCSA is providing a 90-day comment period on the proposal, which will be due May 16. The agency is also conducting four public online question-and-answer webinars. Registration for those can be found here

Click for more FreightWaves articles by John Gallagher.

19 Comments

  1. Julia

    Agreed with above comment. The elds make things worse. If your tired and have time to pull over and take a nap before you cause a problem with delivery issues. You should be able to. There are times that you would like to but you will run out of time for your workday if you do. This is when it gets dangerous. Do you pull over and take a nap and tell your dispatcher to reschedule your delivery so you can take 10 hours off? Or do you go ahead and try to drive 2 more hours while sleepy so you don’t risk losing money and possibly getting fired.

  2. Brock

    Mega carriers are our biggest problem . Foreign people come here get a license can speak read or write English . No respect for anyone or the road . Shippers and receiver and the brokers are another . Accidents were at an all time low during Covid . We have an over compensated politician running department of transportation from indiana who has never been behind the wheel of a truck . Eld is a joke and speed limiters is another . Cars are our biggest problem with cutting us off brake checks . All because it an easy pay day . We as drivers can go on and on but nothing ever gets fixed .

  3. Perry Winkleblack

    Eld didn’t help with safety it, made the roads unsafe. People always in a hurry to be a clock. Most shipper and receivers treat us like prisoners. At least in prison you have access to an restroom. I like how during covid shutdown many drivers didn’t run logs for “food for distribution” the roads where the safest in year’s. The Fmcsa doesn’t want to admit that they are the trucking problem.

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John Gallagher

Based in Washington, D.C., John specializes in regulation and legislation affecting all sectors of freight transportation. He has covered rail, trucking and maritime issues since 1993 for a variety of publications based in the U.S. and the U.K. John began business reporting in 1993 at Broadcasting & Cable Magazine. He graduated from Florida State University majoring in English and business.