Safety Measurement System: ensure your fleet is compliant

If you have not yet adjusted your compliance strategies to align with the changes in SMS, now is the right time to do so.

Last year, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) announced new updates to the Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) program. These changes significantly restructure the way carriers are evaluated concerning safety and compliance risks. The updates to the FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System (SMS) continue to be implemented, and while many fleets have already started adapting to comply with CSA, some are still somewhat uninformed. If you have not yet adjusted your compliance strategies to align with the changes in SMS, now is the right time to do so.

A Clearer Safety Measurement System

First, what is the SMS? The Safety Measurement System (SMS) is the system used by the FMCSA to track violations and determine the safety score of carriers. These recent FMCSA updates to the SMS were designed to create a clearer, fairer, and more effective system for identifying high-risk carriers.

The current SMS evaluates on-road performance by organizing data into seven safety improvement categories (BASICs), which have now been restructured into compliance categories with clearer definitions. This makes it easier for carriers to better understand how violations impact their scores.

Additionally, the FMCSA decided to group more than 2,000 types of violations into approximately 100 broader categories, with the aim of ensuring that multiple citations for the same underlying issue do not affect a carrier’s score, ensuring fairness and avoiding inconsistencies.

Severity Scale, Percentiles, and Violations

Another change the FMCSA has made to the SMS is the simplification of the severity scale, replacing the complex 1-to-10 classification with a weighting of 1 or 2. Out-of-service (OOS) violations and driver disqualifications are given a weighting of 2, while other violations are assigned a weighting of 1. This makes it easier to assess risk.

The FMCSA has also replaced the old incident groupings with proportional percentiles, allowing for a more accurate comparison of fleets based on the number of incidents. Intervention thresholds have been adjusted to better reflect accident risk, such as in the driver fitness category, where the threshold has increased from 80% to 90%.

Recent violations now carry more weight, allowing fleets with a strong compliance history to improve their scores more quickly. Additionally, adjustments to the utilization factor ensure a fairer evaluation, taking into account exposure to inspections and collisions, especially for fleets with high mileage.

Strategies for Incorporating New Measures into Your Fleet

These new measures have been implemented to facilitate compliance and provide greater transparency to carriers in the process. However, if you have not yet reviewed how your CSA scores have changed with the updates, it’s important to do so and begin taking the necessary steps to ensure compliance. According to a recent Fleet-Connection article, you can take the following steps to stay in compliance:

Regularly review SMS scores.
Update your violation management process to minimize risks.
Provide drivers with information on key safety areas.
Implement telematics and safety monitoring systems.

On the FMCSA Prioritization Preview website, carriers can log in, enter their DOT number, and see exactly how their new SMS scores are adjusted under the updated methodology.