Operator rating system

Getting to grips with the Operator Rating System

The Operator Rating System will provide a safety rating for all commercial transport operators with a goods service licence, a large passenger service licence or a vehicle recovery service licence Operator safety ratings have been designed to provide a fair and accurate indication of both the safety risk of the operator’s fleet and the operator’s compliance with land transport safety legislation.

This will allow the NZ Police and NZTA regulatory staff better targeting of appropriate resources to carry out enforcement and compliance activities.

Key points to note about ORS:

• ORS will assist with improving road safety and make journeys safer
• Operators who are performing well will be stopped less often, saving time and money
• ORS will provide organisations such as ACC, Insurance companies, Ministry of Education and banks an opportunity to make better informed risk based business decisions
• ORS introduces a competitive environment for transport operators and the public will eventually be able to access the results
• The ORS will showcase who are the most responsible operators and those who are not complying
• Operators can act now to improve their future rating

What makes up the ORS?

The operator safety rating is based on information collected from three types of safety related events, and different types of events will be weighted according to their severity:

• Certificate of Fitness (CoF) inspections
• Roadside inspections
• Offences – driver and operator convictions and infringements

Crash events attributed to the operator will be noted for information only. These will not be used in the calculation of the operator safety ratings – crash fault and severity will be reflected through the operator’s offence events.

The ORS will take into account fleet size and the number and nature of events, as well as the age of events. The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) will run the ORS.

The initial rating period will be six months but this will be extended to 24 months as more information is collected.

If you are an excellent commercial road transport operator in terms of transport standards and regulations, you’ll get five stars, if you are rated as poor according to the same criteria, you’ll get one star. Eventually your stars will be published on the web, so consumers can make a choice about who they use.

That’s the Operator Rating System (ORS) in a nutshell. But it’s more than that. It’s about putting safety first on New Zealand roads. The ORS will encourage customers to support and seek out operators with an excellent safety rating and produce the first complete view of all licensed transport service operators and their regulatory compliance. This, in turn, will enable regulatory activities to be targeted where they are most needed.

The ratings will be used by your customers. The detailed rating schedule, which won’t be made public, will be used by individual operators, the NZTA and the NZ Police.

ORS will provide you, as licensed transport operators, with safety ratings that show how safe your fleet is and how you line up with land transport safety laws. These ratings will be made public on our website, but that’s not for a while yet.

ORS is being rolled out in several phases over some time:

• August 1, 2009 – TSL labels became the law. The Operator Rating System (ORS) uses the Transport Service Licence (TSL) number to attribute safety events to the responsible operator.
• CoF information validation: you will be provided with information about your CoF inspections and what information has been recorded against your TSL number. You will be able to see how your vehicles, drivers and operators are doing. This is not for public viewing and will have no star rating.
• Roadside inspection information validation: you will be provided with information around your roadside inspections and will be able to see what inspections have happened to which vehicles against your TSL number. This is not for public viewing and will have no star rating.
• Offence information validation will follow later as databases become available and you will be provided with information around offences for your vehicles and drivers against your TSL number. This is not for public viewing and will have no star rating.
• Full ORS rating with star rating not for public viewing.
• Public release.

Page updated: 2 September 2009