Key safety panel questions validity of CSA/SMS scores as crash predictor

Posted By: Tom Sanderson

The Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee is recommending that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) collect more data to ensure that the Safety Measurement System (SMS) is based on science and not on the intuition or opinion of experts. Read more about this in Transport Topics. The committee reported that it did not have sufficient data to conclude that CSA/SMS scores are related to crash probability. Committee member Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for the ATA said “Really, they reflect sort of guesses at the relationship between violations and crashes in terms of severity. We really need to look at the data that shows a causal relationship.”

We know from the fine work done by Wells Fargo that there is no relationship between SMS scores and accidents per million miles.