Life On The Road

FMCSA to examine drivers’ ‘safety fitness’

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is developing a safety-oriented initiative that aims to identify unsafe drivers and hold them accountable for “sustained performance by regularly determining their safety fitness.” As the term “safety fitness” implies, the FMCSA will track not only driving records but also records related to a driver’s health in order “to focus attention on driver physical qualifications.” Ultimately, if enough information is gathered, every driver will receive a safety rating.

     Here’s a summary of a report on the initiative:

     About 5,500 people die each year as a result of crashes involving large commercial trucks or buses and about 160,000 more are injured. While the fatality rate for these crashes has generally decreased over the last 20 years, the decline has leveled off in the most recent years.

     A key FMCSA effort to improve motor carrier safety is implementing the agency’s Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010 (CSA 2010) initiative. Through CSA 2010, FMCSA expects to reduce motor carrier crashes, fatalities and injuries by using better ways to identify unsafe carriers and drivers and expanding the range of interventions to be used with carriers and drivers that fail to comply with safety requirements. After two years of planning, testing and assessment, the initiative is expected to be fully implemented in 2010.

     FMCSA expects that CSA 2010 will provide safety benefits by enabling the agency to: (1) increase its reach by assessing whether most motor carriers and drivers are safe; (2) enhance its investigative and enforcement actions through the greater use of less resource-intensive interventions; and (3) improve its ability to identify safety deficiencies through better use of data. CSA 2010 will employ a progressive array of interventions that can be tailored to match the severity of the safety problems they are intended to correct. CSA 2010 intends to use new data and improve existing data sources (by using its database of licensed commercial drivers to identify all drivers with convictions for unsafe driving practices) to enable a more precise assessment of safety problems.

     CSA 2010 will support evolving and new enforcement and compliance efforts. For example: (1) carriers from Canada and Mexico that operate in the U.S. under open border agreements will be rated under CSA 2010 in the same way as U.S. carriers; (2) violations found through audits of new entrants will be used in the CSA 2010 safety measurement system; and (3) data sources related to drivers’ health (such as drivers’ confirmed positive test results for controlled substances or alcohol) will be developed to focus attention on driver physical qualifications.