FMCSA Issues New Hours of Service Rule. Total work time reduced to 70 hours per week. The changes were released and were contained in a new hours-of-service rule released December 22, 2011. The report consists of a 212 page Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator "final rule"

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) rolled out Comprehensive Safety Analysis 2010, aka CSA 2010, effective 12/1/2010. The goal of CSA 2010 is to develop and implement a uniform and consistent way of measuring driver and carrier safety, and to reduce as many motor vehicle crashes, accidents, fatalities and injuries as they possibly can.

DSMS (Driver Safety Measurement System) Methodology

The DSMS is the second major component of the SMS, along with the CSMS. Law enforcement officials use the DSMS results to examine the safety performance of individual CMV drivers when conducting CSA 2010 investigations. Currently, the DSMS results are being used strictly as an investigative tool for law enforcement and are not available to carriers, drivers, or the public. However, the raw safety information from roadside inspections and crashes that feeds the DSMS is compiled by the same system that will provide CMV driver-based data to FMCSA‘s Driver Pre-Employment Screening Program (PSP). This new program will allow motor carriers to access driver inspection and crash records electronically as a part of the hiring process.4

This section describes the algorithms used in the DSMS methodology and the computational logic used to calculate the driver measures and percentiles for each BASIC and the Crash Indicator for individual CMV drivers. BASICs that are evaluated similarly are described together.

• Unsafe Driving BASIC and Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC
• Fatigued Driving (HOS) BASIC and Driver Fitness BASIC
• Vehicle Maintenance BASIC and Cargo-Related BASIC
• Crash Indicator

4.1 Unsafe Driving BASIC and Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC Assessment

This section describes the measurement of the Unsafe Driving BASIC and the Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC. The definition of each BASIC is as follows:M

• Unsafe Driving BASIC—Operation of CMVs in a dangerous or careless manner. Example violations: speeding, reckless driving, improper lane change, and inattention.
• Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC—Operation of CMVs by drivers who are impaired due to alcohol, illegal drugs, and misuse of prescription or over-the-counter medications. Example violations: use or possession of controlled substances or alcohol.

The DSMS assesses both the Unsafe Driving BASIC and Controlled Substances/Alcohol BASIC by using applicable violations recorded during roadside inspections to calculate a measure in each BASIC for individual drivers. These measures are used to generate percentile ranks that reflect drivers‘ safety postures relative to drivers with applicable violations.

Calculation of BASIC Measure

The BASIC measures for the Unsafe Driving and Controlled Substances/Alcohol

BASICs are calculated as the sum of severity and time weighted applicable violations as follows:

BASICMeasure Total of time and severity weighted applicable violations

In this equation, the terms are defined as follows:

Applicable Violation

A Severity Weight

A Time Weight of 1, 2 or 3 is assigned to each applicable violation based on how long ago a violation on the inspection was recorded. Violations recorded in the past 12 months receive a time weight of 3. Violations recorded between 12 and 24 months ago receive a time weight of 2. All violations recorded earlier (older than 24 months but within the past 36 months) receive a time weight of 1. This time weighting places more emphasis on recent violations relative to older violations

Time and Severity Weighted Violation is a violation‘s severity weight multiplied by its time weight.

Calculation of BASIC Percentile Rank

Based on the BASIC measures, the DSMS applies data sufficiency standards to assign a percentile rank to drivers who can then potentially be subjected to a CSA 2010 intervention. The calculation is as follows:
Determine the total number of inspections with at least one BASIC violation. Remove drivers with no BASIC violations.
Rank all the drivers‘ BASIC measures in ascending order. Transform the ranked values into percentiles from 0 (representing the lowest BASIC measure) to 100 (representing the highest BASIC measure). Then, assign the percentile values for that BASIC to each driver.

from 1 (less severe) to 10 (most severe) is assigned to each applicable violation. See the Unsafe Driving Table and the Controlled Substance and Alcohol Table for the corresponding severity weights of each violation cite. The severity weighting of each violation cite accounts for the level of crash risk relative to the other violation cites used in the BASIC measurement. The sum of all severity weights yielded by any one inspection for violations in any one BASIC is capped at a maximum of 30.

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is defined as any violation recorded in any level roadside inspection that matches the FMCSR and HMR cites listed for Unsafe Driving (Table 1, Appendix A) and Controlled Substances/Alcohol (Table 4, Appendix A) during the past 36 months, and for which the CMV driver can be held responsible (Driver Responsible column, Table 1 and 2). In cases of multiple counts of the same violation, the DSMS only uses each violation cite once per inspection.

 

You may also look at the government version at: http://csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/default.aspx

http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/rules-regulations/topics/hos-proposed/comments.aspx