“Our budget may have remained relatively flat” compared to previous funding levels under SAFETEA-LU, said FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro, but the bill “gave a significant bump in safety…. We’re all extremely excited about the initiatives that MAP-21 enables – much of it was [on] our program’s agenda.”
Among those initiatives on FMCSA’s agenda was the electronic log mandate, which Drake confirmed was on the agency’s schedule to reach Notice of Proposed Rulemaking stage in March of next year, proceeding to a final rule by October.
The EOBR mandate, first proposed in different form decades ago, was among the highway bill’s most controversial provisions. Reflecting that long history and joining others among skeptics of the schedule, “timelines are sometimes not exactly predictable,” said Committee member and Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Executive Vice President Todd Spencer. “There are things that can happen along the way.”
One item on the agency’s program agenda that was not included in the highway bill was expanded authority over drivers relative to making its Compliance Safety Accountability’s Driver Safety Measurement System available for public view, said FMCSA Associate Administrator for Enforcement Bill Quade. “One day we may consider doing publicly available driver-scoring systems,” he elaborated, noting “there are many complications that would go along with a driver scoring system,” among them the Privacy Act and other protections of individuals’ identifying information. “We asked Congress in MAP-21 to make [additional FMCSA authorities] crystal clear, but they didn’t.”
Also on the agency’s docket is issuance of an NPRM relative to the longstanding goal of utilizing carriers’ SMS results to compute a final Safety Fitness Determination for companies, Drake said. He expected the NPRM would be available for comment as early as January 2013.
Quade said in a briefing on the CSA system that “we will propose an absolute scale” for ratings in the Safety Fitness Determination, “not a relative scale” like the SMS BASIC (Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Category) numbers. One of the challenges they’re dealing with is “finding a threshold level that does not change month to month.”
