About SafeMTS

SafeMTS is a collaboration between the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) and the Maritime Administration (MARAD), in partnership with the maritime industry.
Why Share Maritime Precursor Safety Data?
SafeMTS fills a gap in sharing of information on maritime precursor, near-miss safety events, which can be used to develop preventive safety measures and lower the risk of more serious, or even catastrophic events.
Specifically, SafeMTS:
- Collects near-miss data from industry partners that can be analyzed to identify safety-related trends to prevent more serious incidents. Near-miss events are narrowly avoided collisions, operational errors, or other accidents that could have occurred but did not.
- Shares results with industry to support continuous safety improvement.
- Informs near-miss standards to improve the reporting of meaningful near-miss information.
How to participate
Once you have met with the BTS team and completed a memorandum of agreement, you can submit safety information through the SafeMTS Data Portal by logging into Login.gov. If you are a SafeMTS participant and need access to the data portal, you must register with BTS and Login.gov using the same business email address.
Sensitive Data is Protected
The maritime industry has expressed support for the development of SafeMTS, provided appropriate data protections are in place to ensure the confidentiality of sensitive near-miss data. To address these legal concerns, data collected for the pilot is protected by BTS under the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act (CIPSEA, 44 U.S.C. §§ 3561–3583), which prohibits BTS from disclosing information in identifiable form for any non-statistical purpose without the informed consent of the data provider. Data collected under CIPSEA are immune from legal discovery and subpoena and cannot be released under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 522).
Program Pilot
Seven maritime companies participated in the program pilot by sharing sample near-miss records. Participants worked with BTS and MARAD to identify the scope of submitted data to ensure it had appropriate learning value. The collaboration also contributed to the development of the pilot “data key”—a set of baseline core data fields and values necessary for the collection of meaningful information about a near-miss event. An evaluation and summary of the pilot dataset, comprising 7,222 near-miss and hazard recognition events occurring between 2020 and 2022, is included in the pilot report.