New Regulations Added To SMS

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DOT Safety Regulation Update Fast-Fax™
Week of January 17, 2012
Foley Services Your Single Source for DOT Compliance

 

Regulations are an ever changing thing. This week, FMCSA has announced the addition of several recently created regulations, and their violation weights, to the SMS methodology.

As anyone familiar with the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) system will surely know, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ranks its regulations in order of the likelihood that violating the regulation would cause an accident. These scores, or ‘Violation Severity Weights’, give a carrier a good idea of how badly the violation will affect their CSA Behavior Analysis Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC) scores at the end of the month.

Regulations, however, are an ever changing thing and every now and again, FMCSA is required to issue updates to the Safety Measurement System methodology. This week, FMCSA issued updates regarding the new cellphone use regulations.

New Weights

All of the new regulations were added to the Unsafe Driving BASIC so violating them will affect your Unsafe Driving score.

  • 177.804(b): Failure to comply with 49 CFR 392.80 - Texting while Operating a CMV - Placardable HM.
  • Violation Severity Weight: 10
  • 177.804(c): Fail to comply with 392.82 - Using Mobile Phone while Operating a CMV - HM.
  • Violation Severity Weight: 10
  • 392.80(a): Driving a commercial motor vehicle while texting.
  • Violation Severity Weight: 10
  • 392.82(a)(1): Using a hand-held mobile telephone while operating a CMV.
  • Violation Severity Weight: 10
  • 392.82(a)(2): Allowing or requiring driver to use a hand-held mobile telephone while operating a CMV
  • Violation Severity Weight: 10

Heavy Penalties

As you may have noticed, all of these violations have been rated a 10: this is the maximum ranking in the system. This means that FMCSA have assessed that violating these regulations is very likely to cause an accident. You can expect that tickets issued for these violations, and the FMCSA investigations that result from them, are going to come with very heavy penalties.

February Report

These new violations were put into the SMS methodology in January so you should see their effect in your February report. Also in that report, FMCSA has broken down six Vehicle Maintenance violations into 22 separate violations. This was in an effort to paint a clearer picture as to who was responsible for the error, the carrier or the intermodal equipment provider.

If you have BASIC scores that were previously elevated because of violating these regulations, you may notice a change in that score in your February report.

Violation Weights

For those of you unfamiliar with how the CSA system works, and the importance of the weights, we have included a brief refresher course on how FMCSA judges as violation based on time and severity.

Under SMS, all violations are time and severity weighted. So, a violation for not wearing a seatbelt 18 months ago will impact a carrier’s ranking a lot less than a reckless driving citation from 60 days ago. Below are brief explanations of the two types of violation weights used in SMS.

Severity Weight: Violations are assigned a weight based on the likelihood that such a violation would cause a crash. The least likely culprits are given a score of 1, while the most likely are given a 10. FMCSA has published a table that lists severity weights for violations in each BASICs category. Open the PDF below to view severity weight by BASIC:

Time Weight: Under SMS, a violation is weighted based on the amount of time that has passed since the violation occurred. Violations committed in the last 6 months are given a 3. Violations committed between 6 and 12 months ago are given a time weight of 2. Violations committed between 12 and 24 months are given a weight of 1.

Editor: Roxanne Swidrak, Vice President, Operations • 1-800-253-5506 • www.FoleyServices.com • Vol. 111, No. 723 • © Foley Carrier Services, LLC. 2011