Hours-of-service regulations have long been touted as a way to reduce truck-involved crashes. But the annual crash statistics have never really shown a significant decline.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is already launching two pilot programs to research how two changes could potentially make the roads safer. Now, FMCSA wants to take a look at how driver schedules impact crash risk.
The agency pledged in the 2011 hours-of-service final rule that it was committed to analyzing relative crash risk by driving hour, examining the impact of changes in the HOS regs, and examining differences in crash risk after restarts with two nights and those without.
Now the agency is looking to include driver schedule data to complete that research.
In an Information Collection Request scheduled to appear in the Federal Register on Monday, Nov. 17, the agency details what data it’s looking to collect and how.
“FMCSA needs additional data to answer important questions related to driver schedules and how these factors impact overall driver performance and fatigue. This research requires data to be collected for HOS duty logs, accident and incident data, and inspection violations records,” the notice states.
That information from duty logs, as well as incident and crash data, will be collected electronically, and driver data will be sent to a third-party telematics company by motor carriers participating in the study. That data will be married up with data collected by FMCSA in the Motor Carrier Management Information System database – such as recordable crashes and inspection violation records.
The data collected won’t be tucked away from public view, according to the notice.
Pulsar Informatics, the telematics company under contract with FMCSA, is required to develop a publicly available “deidentified” data set to be stored in the FMCSA Data Repository. That means that all personally identifiable information will be removed from the data, and “other methods of protecting privacy shall be utilized as needed.”
“FMCSA has determined that this collection of information is necessary for study completion. Currently, there is no comprehensive existing data set that can be used for this project,” the notice states. “Not collecting this data would result in an incomplete understanding of HOS-related factors that impact crash risk and the effect of alternative schedules as they relate to various aspects of HOS provisions on crash risk in CMV operations.”
The agency is seeking comments on the proposed data collection. Public input is sought on:
- Whether the proposed collection is necessary for the performance of FMCSA’s functions
- The accuracy of the estimated burden
- Ways for FMCSA to enhance the quality, usefulness, and clarity of the collected information
- Ways that the burden could be minimized without reducing the quality of the collected information.
The agency will begin collecting comments on Monday, Nov. 17, at Regulations.gov. Search for FMCSA-2025-0391 to file your comments. LL
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