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Dive Brief:
- The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration plans to have a personal listening session about possible changes to the security fitness determination system. The event will be held at 1:00 PM Central Time on June 29, concurrent with the Texas Trucking Show.
- The agency is considering changes to a list of violations used to measure (as well as weight them) and whether to include inspection data in the mix. In addition, a three-tier system could be simplified, whereby authorities would only label fleets in poor condition as ‘unfit’.
- The listening session will complement the previous feedback and there will be mock sessions as well this month and next only. Written comments will be accepted until August 7.
Dive Insight:
The agency published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking last August, soliciting comments from trucking groups and others about potential regulatory changes to safety fitness determinations.
Truck groups noted that issues beyond the original scope were necessary. They called FMCSA to best sample of the industry compared to his current, limited visits and pointed out a lack of uniformity in state inspections.
In that previous comment period, differing views emerged among trucking groups on whether safety technologies should be used to score safety suitability assessments. The American Trucking Associations gave room for the possibility to do so upon further reviewwhile the Association of Independent Owner-Operator Drivers expressed his opposition.
Major carriers also represented by The Trucking Alliance raised issues on how the system can have different impacts between small and large fleets. Larger fleets tend to have more data, which could be used against them unfairly, the alliance said.
The group also recommended an overhaul of the safety rating similar to that of many Canadian provinces. The team stated that “ratings are a snapshot in time. Stakeholders believe that these assessments are a current indicator of collision risk, despite many assessments that are several years or even decades old.”