The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced on March 7 that it has restored to public view its “absolute measures” of the safety performance of motor carriers of property. 

The agency said it has made the necessary modifications to its Safety Measurement System (SMS) website to make it compliant with the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, the highway passed late last year. 

The FAST Act requires that property carriers’ absolute measures be available to the public.  Duane DeBruyne, FMCSA spokesperson, told HDT that those measures amount to the “raw data” produced by the agency’s Carrier, Safety, Accountability program and so are “not based on relative comparison to other motor carriers.” 

Because the highway bill prohibits the display of property carriers’ relative percentiles, FMCSA pulled that information from public display on December 4, 2015. Also that day, the agency removed the raw CSA data to allow time to revise its SMS website.

“At this time, those modifications are complete and the SMS website is fully compliant with the FAST Act,” FMCSA said on March 7. 

The agency advised that any motor carrier without login credentials for the SMS website may click here for more information on how to obtain a PIN. 

Separately, but also pursuant to the dictates of the FAST Act, FMCSA announced that it has commissioned the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, through its Committee on National Statistics and Transportation Research Board, to carry out a study "regarding high risk truck and bus companies."

The agency said the will "examine the accuracy with which the Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Category (BASIC) safety measures... identify high risk carriers and predict or are correlated with future crash risk or other safety indicators for motor carriers." 

Related: FMCSA Removes CSA Data from Public View