The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has revealed some detail about where it proposes to go with the so-called “Beyond Compliance” system required by the FAST Act highway bill, hinting its Compliance, Safety, Accountability system could see another category as part of the voluntary compliance program.
The FAST Act required the agency to take one of two routes toward establishing the system to provide credit to motor carriers going above and beyond baseline compliance – either credit those efforts in the existing Safety Measurement System of the CSA program or create a new category to stand alongside that system’s seven current BASIC categories of measurement.
The Federal Register notice, published last week and requesting further comments, noted that the agency is leaning toward adding an eighth BASIC. You can think of it as the regulatory-compliance equivalent of the SmartWay Transport Partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in which carriers voluntarily invest in verified fuel-efficient technology in exchange for being named a SmartWay carrier, a tool then for carriers to use in promoting themselves with prospective customers.
The new voluntary SMS category would require carriers to apply to be a part of it, FMCSA Associate Administrator for Enforcement Bill Quade told attendees of today’s Beyond Compliance listening session at the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Workshop event in Chicago. “The new BASIC will be two-tiered,” he said. “One tier would be ‘deployed’” and would be displayed as such in the public SMS, showing that a carrier has put a safety-enhancing technology or program into use in its trucks and/or operations.
The other tier would display as “improved,” showing a technology, program or practice that’s past deployment stage to verifiable improvement in safe operation.
Essentially, as Quade put it, “you’ve deployed this, and we’ll give you credit for it.” After six months, if the carrier has seen improvement in safety metrics with targets set by the carrier in their application, the carrier would be credited with improved status. Quade detailed the entirety of the FMCSA’s proposed structure for the program in brief in his opening remarks at the listening session:
