No ‘Net Benefit’ Found in Controversial 34-Hour Restart Provisions
Photo: Jim Park
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Photo: Jim Park
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A DOT study apparently has failed to “explicitly identify a net benefit” from two suspended provisions of the hours of service rules regarding the 34-hour restart.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued hours-of-service regulations in 2013 that featured two controversial restart provisions. They required that the 34-hour restart include two 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods, even if the 34 hours had already been reached. It also limited use of the restart provision to once every 168 hours. The trucking industry raised concerns about the rule’s unintended consequences, such as increased congestion during the daytime traffic hours.
In late 2014, as part of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2015, Congress suspended those two provisions and directed FMCSA to conduct a study of the operational, safety, health, and fatigue impacts of these rules.
Although the data collection for that study was completed in 2015, the study has not get been made public. However, the law also mandated that the DOT Office of Inspector General review the study.
Last week, in a letter to Congress, the OIG wrote that it “found that DOT’s study met the act’s requirements. We also concur with the Department’s conclusion that the study did not explicitly identify a net benefit from the use of the two suspended provisions on driver operations, safety, fatigue, and health.”
Drivers from a variety of fleet sizes and operations provided a substantial amount of data during the study period, according to the FMCSA. More than 220 drivers contributed data as they drove their normal routes. The data included over 3,000 driver duty cycles captured by electronic logging devices, over 75,000 driver alertness tests and more than 22,000 days of driver sleep data.
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