Webinar Replay #44: CSA: Where Did We Start & Where Are We Going

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Everyone and welcome.

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Mark Rhea: Good morning, everyone. My name is Mark Ray, and I wanted to welcome everyone to the Infinit-I Workforce Solutions Fast Forward Expert Round Table and Information Exchange this morning

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Mark Rhea: before we get started. If you don’t mind, open up your chat, tell me who you are. Tell me where you’re calling in from? No, we’ve got a lot of existing clients. We’ll say hello to everyone.

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Mark Rhea: We’ve got a tremendous program this morning. Special guest, subject matter, expert and voice of our industry, Mr. Brandon Wiseman.

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Mark Rhea: Well, truckssafe.com will be updating us on what we can expect

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Mark Rhea: with the upcoming changes in the SMS and the Csa program.

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Mark Rhea: So I know you’re gonna want to make sure to take close notes, because that in in impacts all of us. I also wanted to remind everyone. Next week is International Row check

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Mark Rhea: with a emphasis on anti break systems and cargo securement along with hours of service and medical cards and all the other things they’re going to check for. and we certainly want to support our

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Mark Rhea: Enforcement partners, Cbsa, and this most important initiative. And also i’d like to offer anyone. It’s not a subscriber

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Mark Rhea: to get a free demo. You can. If we got the pop up here. If you want a demonstration on our system.

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Mark Rhea: I did wanna make sure. You know we have some new content on anti-break systems brand new right off the shelf We’re going to include a link to that content with a follow up email.

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Mark Rhea: But if you want to get your drivers up to snuff

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Mark Rhea: on Abs, you can do that this afternoon

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Mark Rhea: if you’re an existing client, get that content out and and assigned, or if you want to sign up for the demonstration, I’m sure you’re a a customer Service representative can get you up and going and get some content out to

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Mark Rhea: pay our drivers and support our Enforcement partners in next Week’s International Road check. So if you want to, Demo, just check the Yes, we’ll give you another chance at the end of the session.

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Mark Rhea: But I wanted to get that out front and remind everybody. Next week is international road check, huge in in industry, based initiative. That’s been very successful. So

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Mark Rhea: with all that said, we’ve got a lot of people signed in and let’s get started Today’s subject again

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Mark Rhea: is SMS Safety Management Systems and Csa Compliance, safety, accountability programs.

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Mark Rhea: and what to expect on upcoming changes. Mr. Wiseman has been involved in some of the discussions on these changes. He supports. These changes. I don’t have to

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Mark Rhea: remind everybody the amount of resources our industry has invested. In Csa. The metrics are used by carriers, shippers, drivers, insurance companies.

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Mark Rhea: and yes, plaintiffs. Attorneys tend to use this as needed in their cases against us so very important information. Csa was rolled out 10 or 11 years ago.

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Mark Rhea: I can certainly attest to the resources and their anxiety that went along with that roll out. We’ve got some time. We made a few adjustments. It’s designed to improve highway safety through comparative metrics for commercial vehicles

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Mark Rhea: through that obtained through road side inspections, which we can expect a heavy presence on our highways next week from our Enforcement officers with international road check coming up, so

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Mark Rhea: with that being said, we’ve got Mr. Brandon Wiseman again. I want to make sure he is a voice of our industry. He supports all of our efforts. He understands our

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Mark Rhea: our industry insides. Now, the legality of that is an attorney.

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Mark Rhea: But more than that, I think he just understands the the reality of our industry.

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Mark Rhea: Brandon. Take it away.

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Brandon Wiseman: Thanks, Mark, and, thanks to Infinit-I for having me, I really appreciate it, thanks to everyone who’s joining us this morning and spending some of your time talking about the riveting topic of the safety measurement system. It’s an important topic, one that we have to discuss. Because if you are a regulated carrier as marked into that. And, as you know.

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Brandon Wiseman: the safety measurement system is a huge issue for you as a regulated carrier. It it impacts you in many ways.

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Mark listed a few of them. It can impact your commercial auto liability insurance premiums. If your scores aren’t up to snuff.

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Brandon Wiseman: it can keep you from doing business with the shippers and the brokers that you want to do business with, because a lot of them are looking at your scores through the system to see how you are performing from a compliance standpoint. So if your scores start to trend in the wrong direction, you very well could find yourself

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Brandon Wiseman: losing business because of it. And, most importantly of all, as Mark said, it is used by plaintiffs, attorneys in the context of highway accident, litigation.

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Brandon Wiseman: It is used to paint you as a bad actor. It is used to demonstrate to the jury that you don’t care about safety, whether that data actually supports that or not, it will be used in that way. And so it is important. It is critical for motor carriers to keep an eye on

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Brandon Wiseman: their Csa scores, and do everything in their power to improve those scores over time. And so the reason it is particularly important that we talk about this topic today.

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Brandon Wiseman: because the system, as we know it, and as we have known it since 2,010,

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Brandon Wiseman: we’ll be undergoing some pretty significant changes here

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over the course of the next several months, probably not within the next couple of months. More than likely. These changes that we’re going to talk about today

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Brandon Wiseman: will come to be at the end of this year at the earliest, if not, if not, then, and it’s probably going to be next year sometime. But it’s worth spending time now, understanding how these changes might impact your scores

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Brandon Wiseman: so that you can, so that you can see exactly what’s going to happen to them, and so you can be prepared for them. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Here’s kind of the agenda that I would like to follow as we go along here.

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Brandon Wiseman: make sure to put your questions in the Q. And a. Box, and you know we’ll either get to them as we go along, or we’ll certainly have some time at the end. Hopefully to answer questions specifically. But

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Brandon Wiseman: here here’s what i’m planning. I’m: I’m going to first talk about kind of the background of the safety measurement system. What it is, how it works. I think it’s important. We start there to get an understanding of how the system works currently to make sure you’ve got a good grasp on that.

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Brandon Wiseman: so that we can better understand what exactly is changing. We’ll talk about some of the criticisms about the current system over the years, and where that has taken us particularly with respect to some Congressional action.

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Us. Congress stepped in, told Fmcs that they had to do something about the system in light of the criticisms it has received. and that that brings us to the point we’re at now, where Fmcsa is now proposing some changes.

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Brandon Wiseman: and then we’ll dig in deep.

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The proposed changes, at least the main ones. I think there are 5 or 6 main changes that are likely to take effect. and then we will end with kind of my outlook on where I see things going over the next several months with the system and with your Csa scores.

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Brandon Wiseman: So, without any further ado, let’s start with kind of a background of safety measurement system. What is it? How did it come to be? What is it doing? That type of stuff? So SMS safety measurement system is part of a broader program. Many of you may know this already, so I apologize for

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Brandon Wiseman: kind of getting into it here. But, like I said, it’s important that we at least have this first kind of foundational understanding of where we’re at currently, so that we better understand it. Why things are changing, and how exactly they are changing. SMS is part of the broader compliance, safety, accountability, system. Csa.

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Brandon Wiseman: That’s why a lot of folks tend to know these as Csa scores, Csa is actually describing a broader system than just scores, but it it’s just colloquially known as Csa scores, or has come to be known as them.

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Brandon Wiseman: When somebody is talking about Csa scores what they are actually talking about. Our SMS Scores safety measurement system, which again, is part of the broader Csa platform. Csa. The broader system really describes all of the enforcement tools that are available to the Federal motor carrier Safety Administration, including things like warning letters.

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Brandon Wiseman: your safety ratings, audits, all of those various tools that they have to enforce their Federal motor carrier. Safety regulations are all rolled up under Csa. That platform Csa platform was first implemented back in 2,010,

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Brandon Wiseman: and it’s really it’s really in existence, because the Fmcs. A many of you may know.

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Brandon Wiseman: relatively speaking, is a fairly small Federal agency, as Federal agencies go even compared to other agencies that fall under the umbrella of the United States Department of Transportation.

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You know, under that umbrella we have other agencies like the Federal aviation administration, which is huge in comparison to the fmcsa.

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Brandon Wiseman: The fmcsa, as you know, is the agency that is responsible for regulating interstate the interstate operation of commercial motor vehicles so highway transportation.

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Brandon Wiseman: I think, at the the last I saw at any given moment Fmcsa has about a 1,000 employees, total

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and that group of individuals a 1,000 employees is in charge of regulating now over 700,000

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Brandon Wiseman: registered motor carriers in the United States, so they just Don’t have the manpower to get out and enforce their regulations

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via audits, or anything like that, with any significant percentage of the regulated motor carriers. So what they have to do is they have to prioritise motor carriers. The worst

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performing motor carriers to escalate for further enforcement, usually in the form of an audit

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Brandon Wiseman: that is the whole rationale for the Csa platform. Congress stepped in and said, we got to do something because the fmcsa is just not able to adequately enforce the regulation. So we have to figure out a way to prioritize the worst for performing motor carriers.

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Brandon Wiseman: The ways that we do that now are primarily through the Csa platform, and specifically through the safety measurement system, which is in essence the primary enforcement prioritisation tool that the Fmcsa uses. It is the way that the fmcsa prioritises you for fines and audits and things like that. How does it do that? It does it through a scoring system known as the safety measurement system.

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Brandon Wiseman: This SMS system. Many of you again, may know all of this, so apologize for repeating, but it is a system that is gathering a lot of data from different sources, primarily from roadside inspections as your trucks, and as your drivers are out there operating

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and incurring roadside inspections and violations, get written up on the inspection reports. All of that data gets put into the system safety measurement system

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Brandon Wiseman: along with data from any audit. So if you happen to undergo a D Ot. Audit, and they write you up for violations in that audit critical and acute violations. Those are also populating in the safety measurement system. But primarily the main data source. Here

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Brandon Wiseman: is the violations are the violations that you are incurring during roadside inspections. All of that gets brought into the system. and then split out into 7 categories which are known as the basics, the Behavioral analysis, safety, improvement categories. It’s a mouthful. Luckily we’ll talk about later. That’s one of the things that’s changing. We’re getting rid of that acronym. We can just call them safety categories going forward.

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But all of the violations that you are incurring are getting split up into one of these 7 basics. 7 basics are listed out here. This may be a screen hopefully that is familiar to you if you are a regulated carrier. This is a a detailed look at a sample safety measurement system account.

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Brandon Wiseman: These are the 7 basics that you would see if you were to log into your account today. This is how it would look. 7 basics are unsafe driving. Those are going to encompass violations like speeding and lane change violations, failing to

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failing to comply with traffic control devices. All of those traffic type violations get put into the unsafe driving category.

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Brandon Wiseman: But crash indicator basic is the second one, and it encompasses all d ot recordable accidents in which your drivers and trucks are involved, regardless of whether you’re they your fault or not, they get put into your crash indicator score.

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Brandon Wiseman: There is now a crash preventability determination program that we can get into in a little bit. But suffice it to say for [email protected] accidents.

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The hours of service category is the third one.

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Brandon Wiseman: This is where all of the hours of service violations get put. So your 11 h violations, your 14 h violations, 30 min rest, break false logs, eld violations, all of those get put on your hours of service.

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Basic vehicle. Maintenance is the next one. It is the largest basic of them all, meaning. It has the most data in it of them all, which is spurring a a proposed change that we’ll talk about in a minute.

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Brandon Wiseman: But vehicle maintenance includes all of the maintenance-related defects that you would expect. So breaks, lights, tire problems all of those and also cargo securement violations. Get put on your vehicle maintenance, score.

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Brandon Wiseman: drug and alcohol is the next one encompasses not necessarily positive drug and alcohol tests those aren’t. The types of things that get put into that category here. This is a category that encompasses on the road

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drug and alcohol violations if you happen to have them. So if a driver gets a dui while operating a commercial motor vehicle or gets stopped, and an officer finds drugs or alcohol in the in the cab of the vehicle. Those are the types of violations that get put on your drug and alcohol score

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Brandon Wiseman: hazmat, which encompasses all hazmat violations if you happen to haul it. So placarding violations, shipping paper violations.

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those types of things. And then, lastly, driver fitness is the last basic

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Brandon Wiseman: driver. Fitness encompasses driver qualification type violations. So, having the wrong licence or having no licence

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Brandon Wiseman: having an expired med card. All of those things that go into qualifying

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Brandon Wiseman: a commercial driver. Anything you get wrong there gets put on your driver fitness score. So that’s how it goes for month to month. The system is bringing in roadside inspection violation data, and it is categorizing it into these 7 basics for every one of the 700,000 plus regulated motor carriers.

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Brandon Wiseman: Then the other things to know about the system is that we have what are called absolute measures and percentile measures. An absolute measure is just describing your scores relative to yourself. So every month you’re having new violations, maybe put on a particular category.

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Brandon Wiseman: And then the system is calculating your particular absolute measure score in that category. In that month the system is bringing in data for the last 24 months after 24 months. It no longer impacts your scores. But anything that has happened in these categories over the past 24 months

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Brandon Wiseman: is impacting your absolute measure score. How is an absolute measure score calculated? It is calculated by taking each of those violations under the current SMS methodology, each violation, I think there are 950 or so potential violations

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Brandon Wiseman: that can impact your scores. Each one of those is given a what’s called a severity weight, depending on how serious it is, or more likely to cause a crash if you go in and and search for the SMS methodology. Now you’ll find a several 100 page document. You could just Google this and find it.

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Brandon Wiseman: It details exactly how your scores are currently calculated. It’s a document that I’ve read more than I care to admit, but it’s out there if you want to see it. But there, at the end of that document is the entire table

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Brandon Wiseman: of the severity weights that apply to those 950 or so violations on a scale of one to 10. The more serious violations are going to carry a heavier severity, weight than a more minor violation. An example of a tin pointer

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Brandon Wiseman: is going to be what the types of violations you would expect to carry the most weight, using a driver after he or she has tested positive for drugs or alcohol, for example, would be a serious violation, whereas

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a a form and man or violation on your driver logs. They forget to put the the shipping paper number or the trailer number on their log. That’s a relatively minor violation. So each of those violations gets a severity weight.

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Brandon Wiseman: and then the violation is multiplied. The severity weight is multiplied by a time weight. Violations that have occurred more recently carry a greater time weight than violations that are older, If it’s within the last 6 months it has a time weight of 3, if it’s between 6 and 12 months. It has a time weight of 2, if it’s

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Brandon Wiseman: older than a year between 12 months and 24 months, then it has a time weight of one, and then, after 24 months, it falls off completely. So your severity weight times your times weight.

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Brandon Wiseman: equals your total weight for each violation that’s in each category. And then those all get added up, whatever those numbers happen to be, and you get an absolute measure. You could see the absolute measure here in this example. It’s the top number right under the icons. There

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Brandon Wiseman: you could see unsafe driving. It’s a little bit cut off the measure there the absolute measure is 9.5. Does that mean anything to you standing alone? Probably not. What does 9.5 mean? Nothing.

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Brandon Wiseman: It is telling you how you are what your score is on this particular month in that category.

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Brandon Wiseman: What’s more interesting, and what’s more important to you, are your percentile scores. We’ve got absolute measures. Those are specific to me. Your percentile score are what are known as your Csa scores or your SMS scores. Those are telling you how you are performing relative to your peers.

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Those are your Csa scores. That’s what everybody is interested in.

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Brandon Wiseman: How are those calculated? They are essentially calculated by putting every regulated motor carrier in each category in what are called safety event groups.

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It would be fundamentally unfair if the system were ranking all motor carriers together.

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Brandon Wiseman: It would be unfair to have a carrier that has one inspection with a violation in unsafe driving being ranked against a carrier that has hundreds or thousands of violations in that category. It’s just not apples to apples. So what the system does currently is, it places us in safety event groups that are based primarily on

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Brandon Wiseman: the number of inspections with violations you’ve had in each of the categories. So you’ll be in a safety event group in each of the categories depending on your inspection activity. If you’ve had 10 inspections with violations in the hours of service

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Brandon Wiseman: basic within the last 24 months, then you are going to be compared against other carriers that have a similar number of inspections with violations over that time period.

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Brandon Wiseman: And then it puts you on a scale a percentile scale based on how you are performing relative to the others with a similar number of inspections with violations.

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Brandon Wiseman: So the when you see a percentile score. In a basic, for example, this carrier in this example has an 86%

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Brandon Wiseman: score in the unsafe driving category. What that is telling you is that this carrier is performing worse than 86% of its peers in its safety Event group as of this month.

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Brandon Wiseman: That is what your percentile score is telling you

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Brandon Wiseman: you are performing relative to your peers. So

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Brandon Wiseman: the higher the score, the worse off you are.

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Brandon Wiseman: The other thing to know here is that, you know. Aside from just comparing you to your peer groups, the percentile scores are also important from a regulatory standpoint, because the fmcsa has set in each of those categories what are called intervention thresholds.

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It is a specific, percentile score in each of the basics, where, if you exceed that score in a particular month you are going to get that nice big warning triangle on your score that we see in this example

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Brandon Wiseman: the score, the the intervention threshold changes based on your the type of carrier that you are. There’s a separate score for

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Brandon Wiseman: general commodity carriers. There is one for hazmat carriers, and there is one for passenger carriers, so depending on which of those categories you fall in that dictates what your intervention threshold is going to be in each of the basics.

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Brandon Wiseman: and then from each of the basics there is a separate score. So, for example, the vehicle maintenance intervention, threshold for general commodity carriers is currently 80%.

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Brandon Wiseman: So if you’re performing worse than 80% on a particular month in the vehicle maintenance category and you’re a general commodities, Carrier. Then you’re going to have that warning triangle. Put on your score

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Brandon Wiseman: the the most common intervention thresholds for general commodity. Carriers are are 65% or 80. So some of the basics are 65. Some of them are 80, and we’ll talk about in a little bit how some of those are are going to be changing here soon.

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But you you’re trying to avoid that warning triangle at all cost. You’re trying to keep your scores below those intervention thresholds in each of the basics, because bad things happen

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Brandon Wiseman: when you exceed the intervention thresholds. It’s not just the warning triangle. What does that warning triangle mean? It means you are now prioritized for enforcement from an fmcsa standpoint.

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Brandon Wiseman: So that’s what the Fmcsa. And their Enforcement partners, their State law enforcement partners are looking at to see who should we go in and do an audit. They are looking at carriers that are having trouble, namely, those that have basics in the so called alert status.

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Brandon Wiseman: Now, in my experience kind of depends where you happen to be located in the country.

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Brandon Wiseman: But usually it’s been my experience that carriers that have one basic in alert status on a given month

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Brandon Wiseman: are not likely to get audited because of that. It’s usually carriers that have 2 or more basics in alert status. When I start to become worried about a potential audit or something to that effect. Again, that’s not universally true.

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Brandon Wiseman: Sometimes even a single basic and alert status will prompt an audit, but it’s when you start to get multiple basics in alert status where the fmcsa really starts to take notice, and then you may get the knock at the door that you don’t want to get where they say it’s time to come in and take a look at your records.

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Brandon Wiseman: so just be aware of that, but also again, we also mentioned at the start some of the others that are looking at your scores, and they are also looking to see. Do you have any of these warning triangles on your scores, namely, your commercial auto liability insurers, and also your customers Those, and and certainly plaintiffs attorneys.

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Brandon Wiseman: if you’ve got more than if you’ve got any of your basics in alert status, it’s going to negatively impact your commercial auto liability, insurance premiums.

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Brandon Wiseman: your relationships with your customers potentially. And also, God forbid! You get involved in a catastrophic accident that is going to come to light in that litigation, and the story that is going to be told to the jury in that case is, look look at the carrier’s scores here they’ve got.

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Brandon Wiseman: They’re performing worse than this percentage of their peers in this category. How can we let them continue operating? We have to punish them for their bad behavior here, and that’s what is leading to these multi 1 million dollar verdicts that we see in some of these highway accident litigation cases. So.

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Brandon Wiseman: and and Brandon just a plans turning all they need is a motor carrier number to access that information. Is that correct? Yeah. So the thing that that’s a good point mark the other thing to know. You may know this already if you’ve been dealing with SMS for a while, is that for for a long, not for a long time, actually for a very short period of time.

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Brandon Wiseman: These percentile scores that we’re showing here were publicly available for anybody to see that has changed. That changed shortly after Fmcsa published the Csa program because of criticisms in the industry, and that is what we are getting into here in a second

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Brandon Wiseman: Fmcs. They got a lot of blowback about this scoring system folks in the industry concerned about whether the data was reliable, and whether it accurately identified motor cures that were more likely to cause crashes

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because of that criticism the Us. Congress got involved and actually demanded, directed the Fmcsa to remove from public view these percentile scores. So now, if you have a dot number you can log on, and you can get access to all of the underlying data

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for any regulated motor carrier. What I mean by underlying data, all of the roadside inspection data that is filtering into the system. You can also see their absolute measure scores. But you can’t see

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Brandon Wiseman: the percentile scores or these warning triangles for motor carriers, that for any motor carrier, unless you are logging into your own personal account, you have to have a a password essentially your Us doot PIN number to see what your actual percentile score is.

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and then certainly law enforcement has access to your percentile scores. So you’re probably asking, Well, how do those other groups get access to my scores, then to to see how i’m performing

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Brandon Wiseman: insurance groups get access to your scores, either by getting you to provide them your PIN number to log in, or there have come to be third-party platforms out there. That do a pretty good job of estimating what your percentile score is. If you hear a lot of talk about cab reports

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that insurance groups use it’s essentially a system that is estimating what your your percentile score is, and, like I said, they are pretty close to accurate. So even though

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Brandon Wiseman: your scores are technically not publicly available, if you’re a general commodities. Carrier, passenger, carrier, scores are still available to the public. But if you’re a a general commodities, holler or a hazmat hauler, and you don’t haul passengers.

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Brandon Wiseman: even though your scores aren’t publicly available. Technically. people can still essentially estimate what they are and get access to them.

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So that takes us to the industry, criticism. What have folks been complaining about the system? Why have they been complaining? And I have been right there with you, complaining about these things for years.

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There’s a lot of problems with the system, and and whether it does what it claims to do, which is to prioritize the worst offending motor carriers. Does it do a good job of that? Does it

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Brandon Wiseman: do a good job of predicting future crash risk, and a lot of folks have said, No, it doesn’t do that, and a lot of studies have suggested that it doesn’t do a great job of identifying the highest risk Motor carriers for a number of reasons. I’ve listed the amount a few of them here, including disparate enforcement. This has been a big criticism of the of the platform for years.

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Brandon Wiseman: where carriers that happen to be situated in particular areas of the country have relatively higher scores than similarly situated carriers in other areas of the country, because of the way that certain States enforce their laws. For example, Indiana is notorious for having

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Brandon Wiseman: carriers with the highest unsafe driving scores in the country, because Indiana is particularly aggressive

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when it comes to speeding violations. So if you have a lot of vehicles working through or operating through Indiana, then it’s very likely that you have an elevated, unsafe, driving score compared to carriers that Don’t have as much Indiana operations

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Brandon Wiseman: that’s not fair, because it shouldn’t be the places in the country that dictate whether we are an unsafe carrier or not under SMS.

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Brandon Wiseman: So there are things like that that have kind of bubbled to the surface over the years, and that have gotten the ear of the Us. Congress. Us. Congress steps in in 2,015, with the fast act.

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Brandon Wiseman: Many of you may recall this. This is the act that not only removed from public view the public scores or the percentile scores, but more importantly directed the Fmcsa. To commission an independent study of SMS,

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Brandon Wiseman: and then to implement any recommendations that that independent study may have proposed.

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Brandon Wiseman: That study took place over the last several years. It was the National Academy of Sciences, Nas. That conducted the study, and they developed a report. They put together a report. Their findings were issued in 2,017,

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Brandon Wiseman: surprisingly to a lot of us in the industry. NASA’s main finding was that SMS is conceptually sound. In other words, they didn’t tear it apart like what he had hoped that they would tear it apart. They found that overall it was conceptually sound.

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Brandon Wiseman: It did note that that the system appeared to have some data quality problems, and so they proposed, or they they put forth a recommendation that said. Even though the system is statistically principled.

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Brandon Wiseman: they would recommend that the fmcsa. Consider a new model

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Brandon Wiseman: to identify motor carriers that need intervention, and the model that they had proposed was a model called the item response theory. Ir T. Model. You’ve probably heard this term thrown around. What is it? It’s it’s a very complex.

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Brandon Wiseman: a statistical model that is used in other industries. It is used in standardized testing for like sat and stuff like that. It’s a scoring model that is commonly used in other industries. It’s the one that Nas recommended Fmcs a consider moving to

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away from what they currently have into an item response theory. Model

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Brandon Wiseman: Fmcs: a. Over the last couple of years has been testing has been piloting an IoT model.

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Brandon Wiseman: But this is the first big takeaway here, Fmcsa: in in a recent publication that has kind of spurred this discussion that we’re having today has said we are not going to an IoT model.

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Brandon Wiseman: Nas be damned. We don’t care what they say. We have studied the model. We don’t like the model they listed out a handful of issues that they had with that model. But my take away from their publication recently was that they just thought the model was too complex. It is too hard to understand

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Brandon Wiseman: exactly how scores are calculated using that model. It just it’s way too complex, so they have disposed of the I Rt. Model. We are not moving to an IoT model. Okay?

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Brandon Wiseman: So that takes us to what exactly is changing. What are we doing, then, if we’re not moving to the IoT model that the national of Academies of Sciences has recommended?

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Brandon Wiseman: Well, Fmcsa is proposing their own changes to their existing system.

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Brandon Wiseman: They are proposing, like, I said, a handful of changes to the existing system, not disregarding it completely, not moving to a completely new model. We are going to keep the foundations of the safety measurement system that we have in place now, and we are going to make a handful of tweaks to it

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Brandon Wiseman: to address some of these concerns that have been raised over the years. So let’s get into what are these changes? As I said, there are a handful of them that I think are worth mentioning. There is more to it than this. If you are interested in reading the nitty, gritty details of the proposed changes. Fmcsa has a pretty good document on this topic. The New Methodology.

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This is on their SMS changes website. They have a specific website, a dedicated website set up for this. and I recommend you Check that out. If you haven’t already done this, you can actually, if you’re a regulated motor carrier you can log in to your current SMS account and click a link, and see how your scores will be changing. Once these proposed changes go into effect. I recommend you do that to see how these are likely to impact you.

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You. You could take a look at that now, and if you see problems with it. What’s today today is the eleventh. The comment period for these proposed changes is still open for a few more days to the fifteenth. I believe of May

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Brandon Wiseman: that may get extended. We’ll have to wait and see. But right now go in. Play around in the system. If you see problems, get your comments in, so that the fmcsa can review those issues and address them before these proposed changes go into effect. We are in a proposal stage now, as I said at the start.

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I don’t anticipate these changes going into effect any time in the near future.

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Brandon Wiseman: At earliest. It will probably be the end of this year if I had to guess, if not next year. All right.

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So here are the handful of major proposed changes that we’re talking about.

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Brandon Wiseman: They are a reorganization of the basics into what are called safety categories. consolidation of violations into into violation, groups.

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simplified severity, weights. proportionate percentiles.

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Brandon Wiseman: a modification to the intervention thresholds that we talked about in a heightened focus on more recent data. We’re going to tackle these one by one. Here again, as we go along. feel free to drop some questions in, and we’ll get to them

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Brandon Wiseman: all right. So first up are reorganizing the basics into safety categories. Those 7 basics that I mentioned at the start. That’s what we have. Currently. That is not what we’re going to have under these proposed changes. We are still going to have 7 basics, but they’re not going to be the same.

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They are going to be a little bit different.

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Brandon Wiseman: Most of them will be the same, but there will be a few differences. Number one. The first part of this change is like, I said.

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name change. We’re not going to call these basics anymore. We are just going to call them safety categories.

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Brandon Wiseman: The next big change when it comes to reorganising the basics is that the existing drug and alcohol basic that we talked about is going away completely.

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Brandon Wiseman: It is going away. Why? Because that is the basic of the 7 that we have currently, where there is the least amount of data in the system. Why is that? It’s because, like I said, this basic is not covering things like positive drug and alcohol test. It is covering conduct committed within a commercial motor vehicle.

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Brandon Wiseman: drug and alcohol related. So duis and stuff like that turns out

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Brandon Wiseman: we’re not having that many duis in a commercial motor vehicle, or drivers with open containers. In a commercial motor vehicle. There may be a lot of that going on in personal vehicles, but it turns out there is not a lot of that going on in commercial motor vehicles, thank God!

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But the point is because we don’t have that much data in that category. Many carriers don’t even have a score in that category. So it’s not telling us all that much.

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Brandon Wiseman: So what are we going to do? We’re still going to have those violations. They’re just going to be put into the unsafe driving category rather than in a standalone. Basic. So that’s the first big change. The drug and alcohol violations are all going to be consolidated into the unsafe driving category, because that’s essentially what that

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Brandon Wiseman: those violations are. It’s an unsafe driving activity to have a driver operating out there impaired.

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Brandon Wiseman: So we’re just gonna have all of those drug and alcohol violations now impacting your unsafe driving category rather than a standalone basic all right. And and Brandon just make sure the Clearinghouse information is completely independent from that.

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Brandon Wiseman: The drug and alcohol clearing House is a completely independent system. It is capturing those more typical drug and alcohol violations that we are used to talking about like actual positive test results and refusals to test, and all of that fun stuff that all gets filtered into the clearinghouse, not into SMS.

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Okay. So then. what else are we talking about when we’re talking about reorganizing the basics

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Brandon Wiseman: we are talking about splitting up that vehicle maintenance basic into 2 separate categories. I mentioned that we’re still going to have 7 categories. If we get rid of the drug and alcohol basic, how are we still going to have 7? That leaves us with 6?

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Brandon Wiseman: The reason we’re going to still have 7 is because we are splitting out. We are proposing to split out the existing vehicle maintenance, category into 2 separate categories, and that will take us back up to 7 individual categories. Why are we splitting up vehicle? Maintenance?

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Fmcsa says we are splitting it up because it is the basic that has the most data in it.

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Brandon Wiseman: We’re getting rid of the one that has the least amount of data, and we are splitting up the one that has the most amount of data. Why we are doing it. Because, according to Fmcs a.

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Brandon Wiseman: Because that basic vehicle maintenance has so much data into it in in it it becomes unwieldy. It becomes

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Brandon Wiseman: hard to determine the root cause of the issues that are causing an elevated vehicle maintenance category. If I’ve got a high vehicle. Maintenance score

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Brandon Wiseman: we may be if we dig in there, we may see hundreds or thousands of vehicle maintenance violations, and it’s hard to wrap my mind around what is ultimately contributing to my high vehicle maintenance category. So the fmcsa says: we want to make that easier on you to get to the root cause

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Brandon Wiseman: that is causing an elevated vehicle maintenance category. The way we’re going to do that is to split up vehicle maintenance into 2 categories, vehicle maintenance and vehicle maintenance driver observed.

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Vehicle maintenance going forward will be all of the more

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Brandon Wiseman: latent

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Brandon Wiseman: vehicle. Maintenance related defects. The things that could not be discovered by a driver during a thorough pre trip inspection. The things that are actually wrong with the mechanics of the vehicle, things that your mechanics should be checking.

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Those are going to be the violations that get put into the standard vehicle maintenance category.

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Brandon Wiseman: On the other hand, the vehicle maintenance driver observed category are going to be violations that should have, or could have been, detected by a driver had he or she done a more thorough vehicle inspection. These are going to be typical things like lights.

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Brandon Wiseman: entire tread depth.

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Brandon Wiseman: those types of things things that the driver should have caught in a pre-trip inspection. Why? Why are we splitting these up, because if we have a high driver observed maintenance category, then I can. Then I know

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Brandon Wiseman: that the root cause of my elevated score in that category is likely a driver inspection issue. My drivers are not doing a thorough enough

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Brandon Wiseman: pre-trip inspection. I need to talk with them. I need to counsel them. I need to train them to conduct more thorough inspections to drive that score down versus If I have a high, regular vehicle maintenance category, then it’s not so much a problem with my drivers. It’s more of a problem with the mechanics of my vehicles.

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Brandon Wiseman: and I need to get those in for more thorough. You know inspections by qualified mechanics, and get the mechanical issues

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Brandon Wiseman: taken care of to bring that score down. So that’s the idea. With splitting these up into 2 categories, the vehicle maintenance, category all right.

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Brandon Wiseman: Lastly. in terms of reorganizing the basics. all jumping out of service violations will now be in the unsafe driving category jumping in out of service is, you know. Let’s say your driver or your vehicle get placed out of service roadside for a serious violation. If they continue operating that vehicle.

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Brandon Wiseman: you know.

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Brandon Wiseman: flying in the face of that out of Service order when they’re prohibited from operating. That’s a serious violation that’s called Jumping and out of service order right now.

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Brandon Wiseman: If they jump in out of service, order that jumping and out of service order is a violation in and of itself. If they get caught doing that, you will get tagged with a jumping and out of service. Order violation. That’s a tin pointer. When we talk about severity weights. Where does it get placed, though? On your basics

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right now it gets placed in the particular basic where the underlying out of service issue was. So if the vehicle was placed out of service for a maintenance problem, and then your driver continues operating

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Brandon Wiseman: that jumping and out of service violation in that case would be be placed on your vehicle maintenance category. You’d get hit twice in that maintenance category for that issue.

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Brandon Wiseman: That doesn’t make a lot of sense, though, because what we are concerned with when drivers are jumping out of service orders is really the unsafe activity of jumping that out of service order. It is an unsafe driving issue. It is not another maintenance issue. It is the the

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Brandon Wiseman: the conduct that we are trying to curb is the unsafe driving activity of jumping the out of Service order. So what we are going to do now under the proposed changes is move all of the jumping out of service orders under a single basic unsafe driving. So, regardless of what the underlying violation that caused the out of service order is.

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if the driver jumps the out of Service order. Or if you, as the carrier, do that, it’s going to be put on your unsafe driving category hopefully, you’re not incurring many of those you don’t see them very often, but just know that they are going to be on your unsafe driving category going forward.

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That’s the first big change

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Brandon Wiseman: reorganisation of Basics Second, big change are changes to violations. As I said earlier, we have about 950 existing violations in the system 959. To be exact, that your drivers or your vehicles could be tagged with in a roadside inspection

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right now, under the current system, you can go into your SMS account, and you will see those line item by line. Item: potentially 959 separate violation types.

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Brandon Wiseman: We are still going to have those violation types, those 959. In fact, we’re going to be adding 14 more of them.

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Brandon Wiseman: So 970, or whatever that ends up with. We are still going to have the possibility of that many violations. But what we are proposing to do now is to group them into like kinds

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into 116 separate violation groups.

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Brandon Wiseman: Fmcsa’s rationale for this is that determining whether a safety issue is identified is more important than determining how many different ways it is documented.

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Brandon Wiseman: So we are going to fix that issue by grouping like kind violations into violation groups.

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and then for scoring purposes. We are only going to score you on the violation groups, not the individual violations that make that make up those groups.

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So let’s put it this way.

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Brandon Wiseman: When you get a roadside inspection report

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Brandon Wiseman: you are still going to see all of the individual line item violations again, 970, some potentials. But when it comes to putting those into SMS. If there are violations, similar kinds of violations written up on that report that are that are within a single group that are like kind.

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Brandon Wiseman: They will now only show up once on your SMS scores. They will only weigh on your score once, because what we want to do is curb the behavior we we care less about how many times, how many ways that behavior was documented via violations.

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Brandon Wiseman: We care more about that. There was this particular type of problem, and we’re going to punish you for that particular type of problem. This is a little hard to understand conceptually. So let’s look at an example. Here.

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Brandon Wiseman: let’s say your driver is having an hours of service problem. Here is a a very likely potential way that you could see them written up in a single roadside inspection.

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Brandon Wiseman: If that driver is having an hours of service problem, then maybe they get written up for all 4 of these individual hours of service violations on the roadside inspection report, 14 h violation, 11 h, violation, 30 min respite, violation.

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and a 70 h violation that would be written up as 4 separate violations under the current system, and it would impact you 4 times

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Brandon Wiseman: under the current system. Your hours of service score would be hit 4 times for that that one roadside inspection with all 4 of those violations. But

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Brandon Wiseman: ultimately what we are concerned with here is that this driver is having an hours of service problem. They don’t understand the rules, or they are just, you know, violating them on purpose. So what we are concerned with is curbing that behavior.

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So under the proposal, all 4 of those violations, because they are like kind, would be grouped together and shown as a single violation group of an hours of service violation. That’s what this screen is showing it Doesn’t: relate to those hours of service violations. But you can see how.

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Brandon Wiseman: under the proposed system we would have violation groups. You could see here this lane restriction is the top one here.

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Brandon Wiseman: Maybe this isn’t a great example. But maybe there were multiple lane restriction type violations in that particular inspection. Now they are grouped, and you could see that a severity weight is being applied only to that group of violations. If I click that view violations link next to the Lane restrictions

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it would

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Brandon Wiseman: it would. It would pop open all of the violations that are factoring into that group. But it’s that group as a whole that gets the severity weight, not the individual violations all right. So that’s violation grouping.

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Brandon Wiseman: And again, the purpose is to punish particular behavior. We don’t care so much about how many times it’s documented on a on a roadside inspection.

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Brandon Wiseman: Severity weights is the other big change here. This is probably one of the more significant changes that is being proposed, and it has to do with that scale of one to 10 that I talked about earlier. Right now we’re on a scale of one to 10 going forward. We are not going to have a scale of one to 10. Why not?

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Because the scale of one to 10 is very subjective.

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Brandon Wiseman: How did the FM. Csa determine what should be a 10 pointer versus a 5 pointer. It literally just had people within the agency say, oh, I think that one’s a 10 pointer versus a 5 pointer. It was not data driven.

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Brandon Wiseman: It was very subjective in nature, and that has been one of the main criticisms of the system as a whole over the years. So fmcsa is proposing to move away from the scale of one to 10 to a new scale of either one or 2.

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Those violation groups. You could see this in that previous example, are now going to have a severity weight of either one or 2, and that’s it.

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Brandon Wiseman: No one to 10, so which ones get one which ones get a 2

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Brandon Wiseman: severity. Weights of 2 will only be applied to 2 groups of violations, those that have an out of service violation contained within them, and those that involve a driver disqualifying violation. So these are the most serious type violations.

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Brandon Wiseman: If there is an out of service violation within a group within a violation group. That group will have a severity weight of 2, or if it has a driver disqualifying violation within it, then the group will have a violation, severity, weight of 2. What’s a driver Disqualifying violation? There’s a list of them in the safety regulations. These are very serious

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Brandon Wiseman: driver-type violations things like using a cell phone while driving a commercial motor vehicle. There’s a list of I want to say 10 or so of them in the regulations. There’s not many of them, but it’s those more serious

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Brandon Wiseman: violation. Driver related conduct while operating a commercial motor vehicle that will result in the group having a severity weight of 2, all others will have a severity weight of one.

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Brandon Wiseman: Okay.

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here’s Fmcsa’s rationale. Again.

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Brandon Wiseman: Fmcs. A. Determined that assigning customised weights to all violations was not as important as noting that the violation occurred. This is kind of a theme that we’re seeing it’s more and more important that we punish you for a particular behaviour, not punishing you multiple times for the same behaviour. All right.

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Brandon Wiseman: all right. That takes us to proportional percentiles. I want to wrap up here quickly, because I want to leave some time for questions.

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Brandon Wiseman: This is the most complex change of them all. If you’re interested in understanding this more, I recommend. You. Go, look at that. SMS methodology document that I mentioned, because this involves math, and I am terrible at math. So i’m not even going to pretend to understand how this calculation works. I’ve got the calculation here on the slides. If you’re interested.

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just know that one of the big problems we had under the current system was, we talked about the safety event groups.

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Brandon Wiseman: We had an issue where, if you happen to move between safety event groups on a particular month you could see a significant swing in your scores just by virtue of the fact that you moved between safety event groups just because now you’re being compared against a different subset of motor carriers.

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Brandon Wiseman: and it wasn’t fair to have your scores influenced so heavily just by you moving between the event groups. Maybe you only incurred one additional inspection with a violation in a category on a particular month, and that pushed you up to the next safety event group.

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Brandon Wiseman: Well, then, you could see your scores swing wildly all of a sudden. You were doing fine now. All of a sudden your scores are over the alert threshold.

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Brandon Wiseman: That was a big problem. So the fmcsa is proposing to deal with that and to eliminate that problem by moving to a proportionate percentile score. Where now going forward. Your percentile score will not be influenced

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Brandon Wiseman: by just moving between safety event groups. It accomplishes this by looking more at a benchmark percentile score.

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You can see here the process here at the bottom

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Brandon Wiseman: safety event groups used your safety event group will only be used now to calculate a benchmark median percentile for each group annually.

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Brandon Wiseman: and then your percentile score will be a weighted average of percentiles based on those benchmarks. Does this mean anything to anybody that i’m talking to again. There’s math involved. I’m not going to pretend to understand it. Precisely. Here’s the calculation. Just know that what this is doing is trying to prevent those big swings in your score

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Brandon Wiseman: based on your move movement between safety event groups.

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I think, is okay. Last 2 here changes to intervention thresholds. We talked about how there are now the intervention thresholds for each of the basics. We’re still going to have that, and they are all going to largely remain the same. We’re still going to have the separate ones for passenger carriers, hazmat carriers in general commodity carriers.

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Brandon Wiseman: They’re still going to. They’re still going to all be different across the different basics.

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Brandon Wiseman: Most of them will remain the same. For example, if you look at the general commodity carrier threshold right now, I mentioned that the most common thresholds are 65% and 80%.

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Brandon Wiseman: Some of those are going to be changing a little bit. The ones that are changing are going to be the Hazmat basic and the driver fitness basics. Those 2 intervention thresholds are going up. You could see that in the for general commodity carriers the current.

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Brandon Wiseman: the current intervention threshold for hazmat compliance and driver fitness is 80%.

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Brandon Wiseman: But you could see the proposal is that that will be moving up 10 percentage points to 90. So we are tightening our focus in on those particular categories. We are only looking at a smaller group of the worst performing motor carriers than we were under the current system. Why is that

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Brandon Wiseman: Because of all of the basics, hazmat, compliance, and driver fitness, it turns out, have the least correlation to future crash risk. In fact.

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some of the data out there suggest that driver fitness, category has an inverse relationship to crash. Risk.

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Brandon Wiseman: believe it or not. The higher your score in driver fitness, the less likely you are to be involved in a crash. It was just crazy. So that was one of the big criticisms. So the way that the fmcsa is proposing to handle that is, by placing less of an emphasis on those 2 categories

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Brandon Wiseman: the way that it does, that is, by raising the intervention threshold in those 2 categories up from where they were.

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Brandon Wiseman: Lastly.

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Brandon Wiseman: a heightened focus on more recent data. Currently, as I said, SMS brings in data from the last 24 months of roadside inspections. It’s still going to bring in that amount of data. We’re still going to have a look back period of 24 months. But going forward, the system will only

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Brandon Wiseman: give you a score in one of those basics. If you have had inspection data in that basic within the last 12 months. In other words, if your only inspection data in a particular basic occurred a long time ago, meaning you’ve cleaned things up in that basic

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Brandon Wiseman: If it happened longer than 12 months ago. Then you’re not going to have no score in that basic whatsoever. So the data has to be recent for you to even get a score in a particular basic. If you have violation data in a basic in the last 12 months. Then you will very likely have a score in that basic.

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Brandon Wiseman: But if your only inspection data in a particular basic is older than 12 months. You will no longer have a score in that basic giving you some credit for the changes that you’ve made to fix the issue over the last year. All right.

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Brandon Wiseman: That was a lot to get through

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Brandon Wiseman: a little amount of time. My outlook on this is like, I said. I expect these changes will take effect later this year. At the earliest you could preview your scores. You should preview your scores at that website. You can just Google, F. From Csa, Csa prioritization preview and it will come up. We’ve got detailed articles on it on our website. If you’re interested in a lot of content on it. I I spent like 2 h on one of our own webinars

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Brandon Wiseman: breaking this down. So if you’re interested to check that out.

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my big concern here is, you know, overall. I’m a fan of these changes, because I think they go a long way to address some of the problems that we’ve had with the system over the years. What I’m concerned about is that Fmcsa thinks that these changes

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Brandon Wiseman: fix all of the issues, and i’m worried that their next step may be to say, we have fixed all of the problems. So now we are going to tie a motor carrier safety rating to their SMS scores which has not been a thing to this point, your safety rating. You only get a safety rating. If you go through an audit

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Brandon Wiseman: which provides some procedural protections to you you can appeal audit findings, For example. I’m worried that fmcsa may think that there are changes to SMS that they are proposing here are sufficient enough to say, now we are going to tie your safety rating to your Csa scores

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Brandon Wiseman: to be clear they Haven’t proposed that.

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Brandon Wiseman: But what we know is that changes to the safety rating process are on the docket for the Fmcsa to consider later this year. I’m worried that that’s where this thing may be trending, but we’ll just have to wait and see. So that’s my outlook on it.

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Brandon Wiseman: I haven’t left as much time as I wanted to for questions. But we got a few minutes here.

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Mark Rhea: Okay, Wow! That’s a that’s a lot of stuff Drug and alcohol is is moving over to unsafe Maintenance is busted out into i’m gonna call pre-trip violations and non pre-trip violations

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Mark Rhea: grouping violations instead of having severity weights of 4 and 7 and

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Brandon Wiseman: 6.2 is just going to be either one or 2. Is that is that right? One or 2 and and those are out of service. Obviously, the surveyor stuff is gonna be the 2. Yeah, it’s it’s basically out of service violations. We’re gonna get the 2.

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Brandon Wiseman: And then all other violations violation groups assuming they don’t have an out of service violation are going to be one. That’s the easiest way to think of it.

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Brandon Wiseman: Going to tweak the thresholds a little bit. It looks like Hazmat, got a little relief there as Matt and Driver fitness both went up about 10 percentage points.

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Mark Rhea: and that and I like to try to explain that proportional mathematics. I’m just going to say it’s more of a bell curve. Is that a better? Is that a? It’s kind of a

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Mark Rhea: that sounds good. I don’t know if that’s what the math plays out. But yeah, if you’re interested in that check out the methodology document

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Mark Rhea: on data queue, which is a whole. Another thing that a queue is I can. I can speak for Cvs. They want to get it right.

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Mark Rhea: They understand mistakes are made.

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Mark Rhea: The data queue system does work. We had a whole Webinar on that queue with Cvsa as about a year ago. We probably need to do another one.

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Brandon Wiseman: Are there any changes to the data queue system here, Brandon. Not yet. And so FM. Csa has had some listening sessions on these proposed SMS changes that I’ve attended, and I’ve asked the question, how is this going to impact data queues, particularly when you have an adjudicated citation

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right now? Folks who know the system know that if you have a driver who gets convicted of a different charge. In other words, they’ve had a State court convict them of a different charge than what they were originally cited for. You can file a data. Q. Appeal, and you can get the severity weight of that violation dropped down to one.

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Brandon Wiseman: That’s how the system works. Now, my points. Fmcsa was Well, how does that impact data queue? Because now the severity weight in most cases is always going to be one. So it does me no good to file a data queue for an adjudicated citation.

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because dropping down to one does me no good, and they have said. They recognize that fact. Yeah, that’s not going to do you any good. The point is

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Brandon Wiseman: the next phase of these proposed changes, as I understand it, is that once Fmcsa reviews all of the comments, the next phase is for them to do a deep dive analysis of how these changes may impact their other systems, including data cues, including preemployment screening program.

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And then they will make any necessary tweaks that they deem appropriate, based on that review. So we just have to wait and see.

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Mark Rhea: and and I don’t want to

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Mark Rhea: your Your Your observation overall is favorable for these. For these changes, Brandon. I like these changes again. They address a lot of the the problems we’ve had, I think.

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Brandon Wiseman: But i’m going to reserve judgment until I see how it plays out for a few more carriers, because I’m. I’m. Concerned that some things are still not addressed. Very well, so I don’t think it goes all the way. It doesn’t take us all the way to fixing all of the problems. But it does do a lot to fix a lot of the major problems that we’ve had with it.

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Mark Rhea: Yes, and and you’re here a little bird chirping in the background that there’s a possibility of a safety rating link to the safety measurement. So nobody has told me that the Agency Hasn’t said that, but I know, from looking at their docket of of their agenda, their regulatory agenda.

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Brandon Wiseman: that safety ratings are on the schedule to address, and we know from previous years where Fmcsa has proposed to tie a carrier safety rating to their Csa scores that one that was proposed probably 6 or 7 years ago, got shot down. It would not surprise me at all if they try and revisit that now, claiming that

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they have fixed the SMS program.

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Mark Rhea: Well, I would just. I would just make a comment on that.

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Mark Rhea: The elds were designed. We were going to solve the fatigue problem, so we’ll see how that goes. But I know we’re running out of time. We we weeks we’re at our 1 h.

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Mark Rhea: Here is we? We’re going to answer these questions. I think most of them are around the data queue. We appreciate that.

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Mark Rhea: That’s a whole, nother, another Webinar. It does work.

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Mark Rhea: I will attest. Cvsa wants the right information. They understand mistakes are made, and a a disciplined approach to a data queue

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Mark Rhea: is very satisfactory. It works very well. So I won’t. Get into that in detail right now. I did. We got Brandon’s comments right contact right here. I encourage you. He’s a voice for our industry.

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Mark Rhea: Please support his boys. Here’s his contact information. and I also wanted to give one more opportunity to sign up for the free demonstration and also

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restate that there’s a a a hot

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Mark Rhea: right off the topic right off the table. Abs content that we’ve we’ve done we’ll send that with the follow up email. I’ll encourage you. If you’re not a subscriber, the timing is right to get

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Mark Rhea: on a demo.

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Mark Rhea: Get some content out. We’ve got international road check next week. Is that right, Brandon.

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Brandon Wiseman: Next week. Better be ready for the area. Going to be Mini populated

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Mark Rhea: good and bad roadside inspections next week, and and we want you to be prepared for that.

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Mark Rhea: Brandon. Thank you again. We appreciate very much you supporting

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Mark Rhea: Infinit-I Workforce Solutions and our clients, and more important our industry. As these changes will do a lot to improve

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Mark Rhea: highway safety.

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Mark Rhea: Thank you so much. Mark. Appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, everyone. Thank you all.