A number of trucking publications have reported this week that the hours of service restart rules—put in place July 2013 and suspended in December 2014—will be permanently eliminated. The rules required that a truck driver’s restart must include two rest periods between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. and that the restart could only be used once per week.
When the rules were suspended in 2014, congress directed the Department of Transportation to conduct a study to determine whether the 2013 restart rules did or didn’t improve safety. Since that time, the FMCSA and Virginia Tech has studied the effect on two groups of drivers: those following the 2013 rules and those following the old rules.
According to the Overdrive publication:
The study has not yet been made public, but a letter issued by the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General confirms the report’s conclusions. The study’s results dictate the removal of the 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. provision and the removal of the once-weekly limit. The study found that truckers abiding by the July 1, 2013, regulations operated no more safely than truckers not abiding by the rules.
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