Mark Schremmer
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is moving forward with a study looking at how a truck driver’s work schedule relates to crash risk.
In a notice that was published in the Federal Register on Monday, April 20, FMCSA said the study, “Crash Risks by Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Schedules,” will answer important questions about how work schedules relate to driver performance and fatigue.
“The information collection will be used to examine the relative risk of crashes and inspection violations based on various factors related to the driver’s work schedule and demographics,” FMCSA wrote.
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 agency first announced the study in November 2025 and accepted public comments for 60 days.
FMCSA received 19 comments focused on topics such as fatigue risks, inflexible hours-of-service regulations, the lack of safe and legal truck parking, the lack of driver autonomy and concerns about the study’s design and recruitment.
In its comments filed in January, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association told the agency that hours-of service logs don’t indicate whether or not a truck driver is tired.
“As proposed, we do not believe the Information Collection Request (ICR) will achieve FMCSA’s objectives of answering questions related to driver schedules and how these factors impact overall driver performance and fatigue,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer wrote. “Hours-of-service logs do not reveal anything about fatigue, simply how many hours a driver was on duty. Additionally, crash rates tend to increase during certain times of day, which may have absolutely no connection with how long a trucker has been on duty. In order for a more accurate analysis, the ICR should incorporate control groups for comparison, which are notably absent from the proposal.”
FMCSA responded that the study is observational and that the study design controls for time-of-day effects by including duty and driving time-of-day as covariates in the modeling framework.
“This separates time-of-day effects from the effects of schedule factors (e.g., long duty) and prevents confounding between these factors,” FMCSA wrote. “While the commenter noted HOS logs do not directly measure fatigue and do not capture all the factors influencing driver fatigue, HOS logs do provide information on sleep opportunity, time awake, and time-on-task, all of which are directly related to fatigue risk.”
