FMCSA Carrier Safety MCP Server

FMCSA Carrier Safety

US Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) carrier data. Two layered backends:

1. FMCSA Company Census (bulk, refreshed weekly) — every registered motor carrier (~4.4M total, ~2.2M active) with name, address, fleet size, drivers, cargo types, operating authority, and MCS-150 self-reported data. Indexed locally for fast fuzzy search.
2. FMCSA QCMobile Safety API (live, on-demand per carrier) — crash counts, inspection results, out-of-service rates vs national averages, safety rating, and BASIC percentile scores. Queried per-carrier when full detail is requested.

Free, no authentication required.

Carrier identifiers

• USDOT number — the canonical FMCSA carrier ID. Integer. The right key for any "this exact carrier" lookup.
• MC / MX / FF number — operating-authority IDs. Same carrier can have multiple. This dataset is keyed off USDOT, not MC.
• EIN / DUNS — recorded but not indexed for search.

Capabilities

• Search carriers by name — fuzzy match on company name. Optional state filter, active_only (default true), limit (max 100). Returns census rows with USDOT number — that USDOT is the key for the detail call.
• Get carrier by USDOT — full census fields plus a live FMCSA safety pull: crash totals (last 24 months), inspection counts (driver vs. vehicle), OOS percentages with national-average comparators, safety rating (Satisfactory / Conditional / Unsatisfactory / Unrated), and BASIC scores when available.
• Dataset statistics — total carriers, active count, states covered, total power units, total drivers, freshness.

Field model

Workflows

Carrier vetting (broker / shipper): Fuzzy-search by name → confirm the right entity by city/state and fleet size → fetch detail by USDOT → compare OOS percentages to the national-average comparator and read the safety rating.

Specific carrier deep-dive: Detail call directly with the USDOT — skips the search step. Returns census plus live safety in one shot.

Region/category survey: Search by name with a state filter to narrow to a market, or pull dataset stats to see active counts by state.

Compliance trigger check: After fetching detail, treat any of these as flags worth surfacing: safety_rating = Conditional or Unsatisfactory; OOS percentages above the national average; recent BASIC percentiles ≥ 90 (passenger carriers).

Gotchas

• USDOT is the only stable key — name fuzzy matching can collide for common names ("ABC TRUCKING"). Always read the USDOT off the search result and use it for any subsequent call.
• Crash counts are absolute, not normalized — a 50-truck fleet with 5 crashes is very different from a 5,000-truck fleet with 5 crashes. Use the OOS percentile and BASIC scores for normalized comparisons, not raw crash counts.
• MCS-150 is self-updated every two years — power_units and drivers may be stale. The active flag is a better signal than census freshness.
• active_only=false returns deregistered, revoked, and out-of-business carriers. Useful for historical lookups; misleading if you assumed live operations.
• BASIC percentiles for property carriers are not in the public API — expect those fields to be null for freight haulers; this is by federal law, not a data gap on our end.