Less than a week remains for interested parties to submit comments to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on its plan to conduct an updated study on truck-involved crashes.
The Study of Commercial Motor Vehicle Crash Causation was mandated as part of the $1-trillion bipartisan infrastructure law signed into law in 2021.
FMCSA’s Crash Causal Factors Program (CCFP) plans to begin collecting data in 2026 from 2,000 fatal heavy truck crashes across 30 states. The goal is to interview the truck driver and others involved in these incidents in order to identify key factors that may contribute to fatal crashes involving heavy-duty trucks. The agency aims to issue a report and create a public database of crash data before the end of 2029.
The agency is seeking public input on ways it can “enhance the quality, usefulness, and clarity of the collected information.”
FMCSA is accepting comments until Oct. 27, and a related comment request from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics on the planned data collection process closes on Nov. 3.
As of Oct. 20, three comments were published in the Federal Register, including one from American Trucking Associations. The group said that while it supports the data collection activities by FMCSA for the study, “it is critical that FMCSA can sample a sufficient number of serious crashes, and to a sufficient depth, to obtain a thorough understanding of underlying causes.”
Not FMCSA’s first attempt at a truck crash study
A quarter-century ago, FMCSA was also mandated to study truck crashes by Congress. Between 2001-2003, researchers reviewed 967 crashes at 24 sites in 17 states.
The agency’s final report to Congress in March 2026 acknowledged many questions were left unanswered. “Much more data analysis is necessary to reach conclusions about the reasons, causes, and factors for large truck crashes,” FMCSA wrote.
The report blamed an action or inaction by the drivers of the truck and/or other vehicles as critical reasons leading to crashes in a large majority of the cases. Most involved failure to correctly recognize the situation or poor driving decisions.
Other findings were that in crashes between trucks and passenger vehicles, the truck driver was often driving too fast for conditions, and that brake problems were found in almost 30% of the trucks.
Just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020, FMCSA sought input on how to best conduct an updated large truck study. Industry groups and safety agencies viewed the early 2000s research as a possible roadmap, but stressed a variety of technological and societal shifts needed to be taken into account.
“Changes in road user technologies and behaviors present a fundamentally different — and in some ways, more complicated — picture of road safety than would have been captured by the 2001 to 2003 data collection,” ATA wrote at time. It included similar phrasing in its more recent comments filed with FMCSA.
The Owner-Operators Independent Drivers Association was among the most critical commentators of the initial study, and called for measures to ensure this effort creates “a statistically valid analysis that can fairly evaluate crashes.”
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance said while new technologies have increased safety or mitigated the severity of a crash, there have been “adverse consequences” that need to be considered, such as driver distraction. That message was echoed by the California Highway Patrol, which recommended benchmarking the safety benefits and hazards of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
CVSA also called attention to drugged driving, which it said is now considered on par with alcohol impairment in highway crashes.
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