FMCSA Ignores Calls to Improve Highway Safety Today

QualifiedCarriers.com, TIA and other industry have asked FMCSA to address these needs each of these enhancements are simple data pushes. FMCSA has the data, and must share it through its public data files. Unlike the ambiguity of CSA, these items will have an immediate and positive impact on highway safety. Plus, this is what shippers and brokers really need to know. Even FMCSA doesn’t know what a 62 BASIC score means to a carrier’s safety fitness, but everybody knows that it’s business suicide to use a carrier who has been placed out of service. FMCSA has not responded to the following requests for months, yet they push CSA.

 1. FMCSA does not have the regulatory authority to revoke the authority of new carriers who they place out of service (OOS)! Yet they don’t send that data to the public in one of their downloadable files, so brokers and shippers can use it in their risk or operating systems.

2. FMCSA does not have regulatory authority to revoke the  operating authority of carriers with whom they enter a negotiated settlement to correct deficiencies, and the carrier fails to rectify them. FMCSA places the carrier OOS, yet they don’t send that data to the public in one of their downloadable files, so brokers and shippers can use it in their risk or operating systems.

3. When a carrier fails its compliance review, it receives an “Unsatisfactory” safety rating. FMCSA does have the authority to revoke that carrier’s operating authority, but due to the fact that one department has to email an OOS message to another department, email sometimes fails, and the carrier remains operating for months, even years. We asked FMCSA to publish the OOS, so if any email doesn’t go through, at least the public picks up on the OOS, and avoids using such a carrier.

4. By law, FMCSA is required to maintain a “high risk carrier” database and report to Congress what it’s doing about it. FMCSA plans to replace safety rating, with safety fitness determination (SFD) in a year or two. When they do, there is widespread speculation that those high risk carriers will have SFD’s equivalent “unsafe” rating. We have asked FMCSA to post all of the high risk carriers daily, to one of its several publicly available data files, so that industry can make swift use of that data, and stop using those carriers.

5. FMCSA and PHMSA have no way of talking or synchronizing their data. FMCSA does not know what carriers have hazmat certificates! PHMSA, the agency that issues the hazmat certificates, has a database that they, themselves, can’t validate, due to high number of errors. Neither shippers nor brokers nor the DOT itself can validate which carriers have a valid hazmat certificate! Yet, FMCSA plans to introduce a new hazmat BASIC score, essentially guessing who the hazmat carriers are, and reporting on them.

We invite letters and emails to be sent to FMCSA Administrator Ferro (anne.ferro@dot.gov) asking her to focus on the real issues that shippers and brokers care about, and leave CSA to her own use