The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has decided to conduct another rulemaking regarding hours-of-service regulations as part of an Oct. 26 settlement with groups challenging the current regulations.

A federal appeals court has twice rejected hours rules FMCSA has implemented since January 2004, and several groups have been challenging the current regulations for allowing 11 hours of driving per shift and a 34-hour restart of cumulative on-duty limits. The agreement with Public Citizen, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, the Truck Safety Coalition, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters places a hold on that litigation pending the completion of a rulemaking on driver hours of service.

Under the terms of the settlement, FMCSA must begin a new rulemaking process and submit a notice of proposed rulemaking to the Office of Management and Budget within nine months. The agency will have another 12 months to issue a final rule. Meanwhile, the current rules will remain in effect.

“Safety is our highest priority at the U.S. Department of Transportation, and so we believe that starting over and developing a rule that can help save lives is the smart thing to do,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

The American Trucking Associations said it looks forward to participating in the upcoming rulemaking process to further demonstrate how the current hours rules are working and why they should be maintained.

“The current rules have been proven safe over the last five years,” said Clayton Boyce, ATA vice president of public affairs. “The crash rate, injury rate and fatality rate are all at historic lows. The science is on the side of the current hours-of-service rules.”

ATA noted that U.S. DOT figures show that the trucking industry is the safest it has been since DOT began keeping crash statistics in 1975. Truck-involved fatalities have dropped by 19 percent since the new rules took effect, and the number of injuries has decreased by 13 percent since 2004, ATA says. Over that period, the number of registered trucks has risen by hundreds of thousands, while the number of miles driven by large trucks increased by more than 2 billion miles.