WASHINGTON — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is proposing four major changes to the SafeStat methodology to improve the current algorithm.

In 2004, a DOT Inspector General report found “material weaknesses in the SafeStat data” and recommended an overhaul of the program.

The first proposed improvement is a new Traffic Violations Indicator (TVI), which would apply a different measure of exposure than the Moving Violations Indicator (MVI) with the Traffic Violations Indicator (TVI) in the Driver Safety Evaluation Area.

FMCSA has been looking to tighten up SafeStat since a
DOT auditor found in 2004 the program was full of holes

The TVI will be normalized by the average number of power units a carrier operates; expands the use of traffic violation data: emphasizes driver on-road performance in the calculating Driver SEA Value and SafeStat Score: and compares performance of similarly sized carriers.

Issues such as SafeStat’s ability to identify high crash risk carriers, fairness in assessing a carrier’s safety status, data quality, algorithm consistency, and carrier coverage were examined in developing the new TVI. The FMCSA says the TVI identifies more carriers with higher crash risk, improves geographical coverage: simplifies and improves consistency of the SafeStat algorithm, and covers more carriers while using better data.

This second proposed improvement, says FMCSA, would reduce the amount of time considered from 30 months of data to 24 months for: state-reported crash data when calculating the Accident Involvement Indicator (AII); inspection data when calculating the Vehicle Inspection Indicator (VII) and Driver Inspection Indicator (DII); traffic violation data when calculating the Traffic Violations Indicator (TVI), and recently closed enforcement case data when calculating the Enforcement History Indicator (EHI).

The agency says the shortened period increases emphasis on more recent events and aligns the SafeStat time frame with other FMCSA systems and reports.

The last two proposals include simplifying the calculation of the Accident SEA Value by establishing one standard of measuring crash rate, thereby avoiding potentially conflicting results of multiple standards; and applying more vehicle out-of-service (OOS) violation data for the Vehicle Inspection Indicator (VII).

While conducting Level 3 inspections of the driver, an enforcement officer may discover vehicle OOS violations. Although these vehicle OOS violations are currently not being used in the VII, which considers only the result of vehicle inspections (Levels 1, 2, and 5), they are indicative of unsafe vehicle conditions, says FMCSA.