The U.S. DOT has formally notified Congress that a required study on 2013 hours of service regs pertaining to 34-hour restarts revealed those restrictions provide no safety benefit, verifying a DOT Inspector General notice issued last week on the study’s conclusions. The DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has confirmed on its website that the 2013 regs will not go back into effect, given the study’s results.
The 34-hour restart regulations took effect July 1, 2013, and were suspended on Dec. 15, 2014, following widespread pushback from the industry. As part of a broader hours-of-service overhaul by the DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the regulations required 34-hour restarts to include two 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods and allowed truckers to only take one restart per 168-hour period.
Congress suspended those provisions in December 2014 and required FMCSA to perform the study to determine whether they could go back into effect.
The study, however, concluded the regs did not enhance safety or lower driver fatigue. FMCSA, in partnership with Virginia Tech’s Transportation Institute, studied 235 truck operators for five months. Half of the drivers operated under the July 2013-December 2014 regs. The other half did not, meaning their restarts did not need two 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods. Those drivers could also use the restart as often as they wanted.
Not only did the drivers operating under the more restrictive regulations show no greater levels of safety, in some cases they were less safe, according to FMCSA’s summary of the research provided to Congress this week.
For instance, drivers whose restarts included the two early morning periods recorded 0.37 safety critical events per 100 hours of driving, compared to 0.34 events for drivers operating otherwise. Safety critical events included hard braking, hard acceleration, swerves, contact with other objects and speeding. Likewise, drivers who were only allowed to use one restart in a 168-hour period recorded 0.37 safety critical events in 100 hours of driving, compared to 0.36 for the other driver subset.
Drivers’ were monitored via video recorder systems that trigger during safety critical events, which were then reviewed by researchers. The agency and VTTI also used electronic logging device data for the study, as well as wrist actigraphs to determine sleep timing and quality and brief psychomotor vigilance tests to measure their alertness levels.
