The Impact of Driving, Non-Driving Work, and Rest Breaks on Driving Performance in Commercial Motor Vehicle Operations
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Summary
This study, conducted by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), investigates the impact of driving hours, total work hours, and rest breaks on the safety performance of commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers. The research aims to inform hours-of-service (HOS) regulations by determining whether fatigue-related risks are driven solely by time spent driving or by the cumulative duration of the entire workday, including non-driving tasks. The analysis utilized data from the Naturalistic Truck Driving Study, involving 97 drivers from four for-hire trucking companies who drove instrumented trucks for approximately four weeks each, generating about 735,000 miles of continuous data. Researchers combined vehicle telemetry with daily activity registers to create a hybrid dataset that tracked both driving and non-driving activities. Driver performance was measured by the occurrence of safety-critical events (SCEs), defined as crashes, near-crashes, crash-relevant conflicts, and unintentional lane deviations. Statistical methods included negative binomial regression models and odds ratio analyses to assess SCE risk across different time intervals. The study found that CMV drivers spent an average of 66% of their shift driving, 23% on non-driving work (such as paperwork or loading), and 11% resting. Regarding driving hours, the risk of SCEs increased significantly during the 11th hour of driving compared to the 1st and 2nd hours, though no significant increase was observed when comparing the 11th hour to the 10th. More critically, the analysis of total work hours revealed that SCE risk increased as the total workday progressed, regardless of driving duration. This suggests that non-driving work contributes to fatigue, creating a time-on-task effect that extends beyond driving alone. For instance, drivers who performed several hours of non-driving work before driving late into the 14-hour workday exhibited higher SCE risks. Finally, breaks from driving were found to be effective in reducing SCE rates, particularly within the hour following a break, counteracting the negative effects of prolonged time-on-task. These findings imply that current HOS regulations, which primarily limit driving hours, may not fully address fatigue risks associated with total work duration. The interaction between driving and non-driving work suggests that cumulative work hours significantly impact driver safety. Consequently, the study supports the importance of adequate rest breaks and suggests that regulatory frameworks might benefit from considering total work hours rather than driving hours alone to mitigate fatigue-related crashes.
Key finding
Safety-critical event risk increases with total work hours, particularly when non-driving work precedes driving, whereas breaks from driving significantly reduce event rates in the subsequent hour.
Methodology
naturalistic
Sample size: 97
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via bulk_ingest_rosap on 2026-05-23 (6 acquisition events logged).
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | rosap | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-23 |
| archive | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-23 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| chunk | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| embed | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-02 |
| enrich | skipped | — | — | — | 3 | 2026-07-02 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-23 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 19 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
- shift work driving
- truck driver fatigue
- hours of service
- time on task
- circadian factors
- sleep deprivation
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Empirical Findings: physiological data, behavioral performance data, crash risk outcomes