Sharon-Lise Normand, co-chair of a National Academies of Science panel to study monitoring of motor carriers in the United States, briefed congressional staff on June 26, 2017.

The study was in response to Congress’ FAST (Fixing American’s Surface Transportation) Act to review the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) approach to assessing motor carrier safety. The study concluded that, while the FMCSA’s conceptual approach to assessing safety is sound, a more “statistically principled” model to assess safety risk should be adopted.

In its report, the panel said,

We have found, for the most part, that the current SMS implementation is defensible as being fair and not overtly biased against various types of carriers, to the extent that data on [the Motor Carrier Management Information System] can be used for this purpose. However, much of what is now done is ad hoc and based on subject-matter expertise that has not been sufficiently empirically validated.

The briefing was covered in Politico, Carnegie Mellon, Transport Topics and the Journal of Commerce, among others. In Politico, Normand said, "Their mission is to prevent crashes, and crashes are really infrequent, which is a good thing, so it wouldn't be practical or feasible to use crashes as the basis of the assessment or monitoring of the carriers because there's just too few events."

The FMCSA has been criticized as being flawed in its approach to estimating the risk and safety of its vehicles. It currently collects information from crashes, inspections, and other sources to come up with its recommendation. The panel advised that collecting data from more states and using statistical models like the ones that are used to measure quality in hospitals and schools.

These sweeping changes would likely bring significant changes to the way that FMCSA measures and reports on quality, and has the potential to further improve the system to assess and prevent crashes.

The committee is under the Committee for National Statistics at NAS.

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