Feds Consider Developing New Program to Measure Drivers’ Safety Performance

This story appears in the July 15 print edition of Transport Topics.

Federal officials said they are considering developing a program that would use truck drivers’ violation and inspection data to determine whether they are safe and take corrective action against unsafe ones.

In a report to Congress in June, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration did not commit to implementing what it called a “driver safety fitness determination” but said that it would involve a nine-year process of studying, testing and going through the regulatory process before such a program could be launched.

An FMCSA spokeswoman would not say whether the agency planned to move forward with driver fitness ratings.

The fitness determination would be part of FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, which gathers inspection and violation data on drivers and motor carriers to determine a priority for such efforts as investigations and inspections.

“The FMCSA has considered how it would augment existing driver efforts by developing an enhanced methodology to identify drivers posing the highest safety risk and implementing enforcement processes to address unsafe driver behavior,” the agency said in its report requested by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

FMCSA’s outline of how it would implement the program, if it decided to proceed, includes five years of planning and testing, followed by four years dedicated to the regulatory process.

The ratings would be similar to carrier safety fitness determinations, which could result in a carrier being taken off the road.

FMCSA is limited in the actions it can take to pull individual drivers off the road. It must declare a driver to be an “imminent hazard” to do so, an action it only takes a few times a year.

The federal agency has planned carrier safety fitness determinations as part of CSA. It said it expects to formally propose a rule for carrier fitness determinations in January 2014.

For a driver fitness determination, FMCSA would use CSA data to declare whether a trucker is allowed to drive. The agency could also use the ratings to take other intervention steps to try to correct drivers’ problems, it said.

Currently, fitness determinations can only be made after a carrier is thoroughly investigated.

Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for American Trucking Association, agreed with the proposed regulatory approach.

“FMCSA’s perspective has been that by assigning scores to carriers, you hold them accountable, and that by doing so, you drive improvements to safety,” he said. “Intuitively, that same principle would hold true with respect to individual operators.”

Other groups were concerned with FMCSA’s proposal.

“Overall, it is unclear if this is a plan that will have the intended results,” said Norita Taylor, spokeswoman for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. FMCSA should instead focus on other regulatory efforts, such as requiring minimum training standards for truck drivers, Taylor said.

The Teamsters wants to make sure that FMCSA uses the correct data for its determinations, said Lamont Byrd, director of safety.

“We recognize the need to identify unsafe carriers and unsafe drivers, and have strategies and interventions to either improve their safety performance or remove them out of the industry,” he said. “But we have some concerns on ensuring that the data collected on drivers is accurate, that drivers have an opportunity to correct any errors that may exist in their respective file.”

Byrd said he is confident FMCSA could implement the program if it is properly funded.