Background and Policy

In accordance with the Office of Science and Technology Policy Memorandum entitled “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” FMCSA is committed to sharing data collected for Federally funded research and technology projects with the broader research community and general public. As outlined in the Policy Memorandum, data sets that have been processed and reduced should be developed into de-identified data sets that are made publicly available.

In each public-use dataset released by FMCSA, all personally identifiable information (PII) are removed, including names of drivers, names of fleets, and other relevant variables. When necessary, other methods of protecting privacy are utilized, such as top-coding, bottom-coding, data swapping, or applying differential privacy techniques to protect study participants while still facilitating public-use files. 

CMV Driver Restart Study

In the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2015, Congress directed FMCSA to conduct a Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) Driver Restart Study comparing 5-month driver work schedules and assessing operator fatigue and safety critical events (SCEs) among participating CMV drivers who operated under:

• The restart provisions in effect between July 1, 2013, and December 15, 2014 (i.e., 2-night rest period); and
• The restart provisions in effect on June 30, 2013 (i.e., 1-night rest period).

The CMV Driver Restart Study, completed in December of 2015, was a landmark study—the largest naturalistic driving study of its kind completed to date. The analyses conducted in this study were focused on addressing the research questions that were directed in the statute. However, an important by-product of this study is a very rich data set that can be mined to answer many additional research questions that were not addressed in the final report. This data set will provide the research community with a new opportunity to inform techniques and strategies that can be used to better the safety, health, and wellness of CMV drivers and the motoring public. This public-use dataset will provide the opportunity to further the science regarding work schedules and fatigue. Potential studies include examining fatigue of drivers working and driving for extended hours; fatigue levels of drivers who sleep less than 5 hours per 24-hour period; modeling the relationship between amount of sleep and off-duty time; examining how fatigue varies across the work day and work week; examining the impacts of driving breaks; and potentially modeling the aspects of driver schedules that are associated with greater fatigue.

Interested parties can access the complete de-identified, public-use dataset in the “Related Links” section of this page. A quick-start guide is provided in the “Related Documents” section of this page. Careful review of the quick-start guide is strongly recommended, as there are very specific formatting considerations. Failure to follow the steps described in the quick-start guide will result in errors.

Note: Upon completion of analysis, and before being released in a public-use data set, these data were divested of PII, de-identified, and then reviewed by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for compliance with Federal, departmental, and ethical guidelines.

Public-Use Dataset Format

The files in the public-use dataset are SAS files. SAS products and software can be found at www.sas.com. SAS software is available on a wide variety of computer platforms and operating systems. The data files are being supplied as SAS files to enable users to re-run the analytical programs used in the study to achieve the results documented in the final report. A user familiar with SAS can easily change and tailor these programs to work with the code that is already supplied. In terms of format, SAS is the most sustainable choice for the CMV Driver Restart Study public-use dataset.