Report recommends sweeping changes to CSA scoring system

James Jaillet  June 27, 2017

FMCSA says it will respond to the National Academies report within 120 days.

National Academies of Science researchers have issued a Congressionally mandated report recommending that the U.S. Department of Transportation overhaul its Compliance, Safety, Accountability carrier rating system.

The report says DOT needs to make CSA’s Safety Measurement System more fair and accurate in assessing motor carriers’ safety risk, and that data used to create the rankings is in need of “immediate attention.”

Key recommendations from the report, made public Tuesday, include:

• Reconfiguring the SMS statistical model (the percentile ranking used to target carriers for intervention) with an “item response theory” (IRT) model that more accurately targets at-risk carriers;
• Making the scoring system more transparent and easier for carriers to replicate and understand; and
• Departing from using relative metrics as the sole means for targeting carriers.

The NAS urged further study of the impact of the public display of SMS rankings.  Researchers recommend that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration better collaborate with state partners and other data providers to collect more data and higher quality data, specifically related to crash reports and to carriers’ operations (miles traveled, number of power units, etc.).

NAS will provide the roughly 130-page report, “Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement,” to FMCSA and to Congress, which called for the report in the 2015 FAST Act highway bill. The act also pulled the SMS’ BASIC percentile rankings from public view.

The law stipulated that the NAS must issue recommendations on how FMCSA can fix the data and methodology issues that have plagued CSA since its 2011 onset — and that FMCSA adopt the recommendations — before the SMS can be made public again.

It’s unclear yet how the agency intends to act on the report’s recommendations or the timeline on which it plans to adopt any CSA reforms. FMCSA confirmed it has received the report and says it will issue a response to Congress within the 120 days allotted by the FAST Act. An agency spokesperson says it is “reviewing the findings.”

The agency has already undertaken an effort to improve crash reporting through its Post-Accident Report Review Subcommittee of its Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee. That group is tasked with making recommendations to improve crash-report utility and standardization.

The NAS report on CSA and its underlying data reaches an oft-heard conclusion: While the premise behind CSA’s SMS is sound, FMCSA’s execution of the program was flawed from the ground up. CSA relies on in some ways inadequate data, NAS researchers conclude, which is then funneled into a scoring system that has not been “sufficiently empirically validated.”

Findings in other ways reiterate conclusions reached by Overdrive’s multi-year CSA’s Data Trail series, one of many analyses of CSA’s flaws and their impact on carriers. The report notes the chief criticisms of the CSA program: Some BASICs lack correlation with crash risk, data insufficiency, use of relative rankings, use of non-fault or nonpreventable crashes, state variations in inspections and violations, lack of consistency in violation coding, a lack of transparency of the SMS algorithm and the public availability of SMS rankings.

“Conceptually, SMS is structured reasonably,” the NAS report concludes.  However, researchers add, “too much of the detail is ad hoc,” referring to FMCSA’s execution of the program.

The report doesn’t go into depth about its recommendations for a new statistical model to replace the SMS model, but it touts the IRT model as one that has been proven to work in fields such as health care and education to achieve outcomes similar to those sought by the SMS. IRT models are used in health care to assess the quality of care given to patients and in education to assess teachers’ performance. In both fields, IRT models are used to target poor performers for intervention, just as FMCSA does with the SMS rankings.

NAS’ principal recommendation is that FMCSA develop an IRT model over the next two years and then implement it in place of the SMS “if it [demonstrates] to perform well in identifying motor carriers for alerts.” Transitioning to an IRT model, the study’s authors believe, would in part help soothe some of these problems. It would make violation weighting more data-focused (less reliant on severity weights), provide better transparency, account for holes in data and more.

Other NAS recommendations seek to tackle SMS flaws, too. FMCSA needs to work more closely with states to homogenize data reporting and collection, researchers recommend. The agency also should find new sources to assess carriers’ safety risk, such as analyzing driver turnover rates and driver pay methods.

FMCSA needs to build a more “user-friendly version” of the Motor Carrier Management Information System (the data well that feeds CSA) and make its scoring methodology more accessible, NAS says. Such changes would make it easier for carriers to understand how they’re being scored and learn how to improve their scores and, hence, their safety practices.

Before going public with a revamped SMS, the agency should also further analyze the ramifications of publicly displaying the SMS rankings. Shippers and brokers have to varying degrees used the rankings to deny carriers business, while insurers in some cases used the system to charge higher premiums.

What’s your view on the issues identified with CSA? If you’re reading on a smartphone, tap the image to call and leave us a message to weigh in with your story. We’ll round up responses in a special mailbag podcast. Alternately, drop a comment below. If you’re on a desktop, call 530-408-6423. Make sure to tell us your name and state of residence.

Researchers also recommend FMCSA find a way to implement an absolute scoring metric into the SMS algorithm to select carriers for intervention, rather than relying solely on relative rankings. Relative ratings can be a moving target for carriers trying to boost their safety culture.

NAS, established by Congress in 1863 as a private institution, intends to provide nonpartisan and objective research to lawmakers and regulators to help steer policy decisions. Congress funneled the funding for the new study through FMCSA.

Changes to CSA Scoring System – Facts and Opinion

By Dennis McGee; Dennis McGee and Associates Consulting

1. Because every motor carrier is not inspected, data is not available for every carrier.
2. SMS compares all rated motor carriers against all other rated carriers, rather than comparing small carriers with small carriers and large carriers with large carriers.  For accuracy, both large and small carriers should be compared with similarly sized carriers.
3. All crashes are weighted equally to determine an SMS score. CSA looks at crash involvement as the measurement, not fault. Is it true that a driver is less safe because of involvement in crashes, even when the accident is not their fault?
4. This is extremely challenging.  An example of this is, if a truck was stopped waiting for a traffic signal to change from red, or a school bus driver was in the same situation and is struck from behind by another vehicle, why should the truck company or school bus company be penalized for the “accident” with no background that neither the truck or school bus driver were not at fault. With no perspective to these accidents, the readers would believe that the information is reflective of the truck driver transporting freight or the school bus driver transporting their child.
5. Crash scenarios that could be classified as non-preventable and currently charged to a motor carrier’s CSA score are if a CMV vehicle was struck by another who was: driving under the influence, driving the wrong direction, striking the rear of a CMV; and/or striking the CMV while it was legally stopped.
6. There is a lack of sufficient data to reliably assess the performance of carriers. According to the CSA’s findings, they only had enough data to assign scores to three percent of active carriers in all seven of the BASICS.
7. States also have differences in their enforcement of certain laws and regulations. A driver is much more likely to get a moving violation in Indiana (29%) than Mississippi (1.4%). Vigillo Inc. (8) found that about half of all speeding tickets were written in ten states. A driver operating in one of these states may have higher scores due to stricter enforcement.

The GAO report concluded among other things:

1. “For SMS to be effective in identifying carriers more likely to crash, the violations that FMCSA uses to calculate SMS scores should have a strong predictive relationship with crashes.  However, based on GAO’s analysis of available information, most regulations used to calculate SMS scores are not violated often enough to strongly associate them with crash risk for individual carriers.”
2. “SMS is intended to provide a safety measure for individual carriers, and FMCSA has not demonstrated relationships between groups of violations and the risk that an individual motor carrier will crash.”
3. “To improve the CSA program, the Secretary of Transportation should direct the FMCSA Administrator to take the following two actions:  Revise the SMS methodology to better account for limitations in drawing comparisons of safety performance information across carriers; in doing so, conduct a formal analysis that specifically identifies:
4. Limitations in the data used to calculate SMS scores including variability in the carrier population and the quality and quantity of data available for carrier safety performance assessments, and
5. Limitations in the resulting SMS scores including their precision, confidence, and reliability for the purposes for which they are used.”
6. “Data used to determine a carrier’s score is inconsistent due to differences in inspection and enforcement policies among the states.”
7. “Scores for small carriers may be inflated and fluctuate greatly because there is less data available.”
8. “Some of the data is self-reported, such as data used to calculate scores in the Unsafe Driving BASIC the Crash Indicator BASIC. This leads to inaccurate, missing or misleading reports from carriers.”
9. “Most regulations factoring into the calculations aren’t violated enough to be tied to crash risk. When the GAO studied the violations, 593 of the 750 violations studied were only violated by less than 1% of carriers.”
10. “A majority of carriers that are determined to be “high risk” by CSA have not crashed at all, showing a weak relationship between BASICs scores and crash occurrence.”(5)
11. The GAO report also noted that “most carriers lack sufficient safety performance data to ensure that FMCSA can reliably compare them with other carriers.”  Further, in recent testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, U.S. GAO Comptroller General Gene Dodaro noted that SMS scores are so flawed that they should be removed from public view.

Congress commissioned the GAO Report due to concern over the effectiveness of the SMS scoring model. The Report suggests that only motor carriers who have sufficient data should be scored. Fewer carriers would be scored, but scores would be more accurate.

The key changes that FMCSA made to the SMS public website by March 25, 2011, were:

• Replace ALERT symbol currently displayed in orange on the SMS website with the symbol of an exclamation mark inside a yellow triangle.
• Place the following guidance and disclaimer language on the SMS website to read:
• The data in the Safety Measurement System (SMS) is performance data used by the Agency and Enforcement Community. A     symbol, based on that data, indicates that FMCSA may prioritize a motor carrier for further monitoring.
• The    symbol is not intended to imply any federal safety rating of the carrier pursuant to 49 USC 3114.  Readers should not draw conclusions about a carrier’s overall safety condition simply based on the data displayed in this system.  Unless a motor carrier in the SMS has received an UNSATISFACTORY safety rating pursuant to 49 CFR Part 385, or has otherwise been order to discontinue operations by the FMCSA, it is authorized to operate on the nation’s roadways.”

“As of Dec. 4, 2015, pursuant to the FAST Act of 2015, much of the information previously available on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) website related to property carrier’s compliance and safety performance will no longer be displayed publicly.

“The data in the Safety Measurement System (SMS) is performance data used by the Agency and Enforcement Community. A     symbol, based on that data, indicates that FMCSA may prioritize a motor carrier for further monitoring.

The    symbol is not intended to imply any federal safety rating of the carrier pursuant to 49 USC 3114.  Readers should not draw conclusions about a carrier’s overall safety condition simply based on the data displayed in this system.  Unless a motor carrier in the SMS has received an UNSATISFACTORY safety rating pursuant to 49 CFR Part 385, or has otherwise been ordered to discontinue operations by the FMCSA, it is authorized to operate on the nation’s roadways.”

The FMCSA website offers the below information to its readers for an “unsatisfactory” rated motor carrier.

“U.S. DOT# XXXXXXX is currently under an Out-of-Service order from FMCSA and shall not operate. Out-of-Service Reason: Unsatisfactory = Unfit.”