WASHINGTON — After declining to let autonomous trucking companies substitute cab-mounted warning beacons for ground-based devices to alert passing motorists of a disabled truck, federal regulators plan a deeper dive into how much crash protection traditional devices actually provide.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is looking for 256 drivers to collect data for an experimental study, “Warning Devices for Stopped Commercial Motor Vehicles.” FMCSA will use the data to evaluate “whether warning devices meaningfully influence crash-relevant aspects of human performance in the presence of a parked or disabled commercial motor vehicle (PDCMV), and if so, how and to what extent,” according to a notice published Tuesday.
“Given the increasing focus on ADS (automated driving systems), questions surrounding the safety of CMV drivers when deploying warning devices, and the availability of new technology and alternative devices since these questions were last explored in the 1980s, there is a need to thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of warning devices under current regulations,” FMCSA stated in the notice.
Current FMCSA regulations have specific rules on how and where devices such as warning triangles, flares and fuses must be placed in relation to a disabled truck based on road and traffic attributes at the site of the breakdown. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also prescribes minimum performance and design specifications for warning devices.
But emerging driverless technology presents a challenge to those regulations because there will be no driver in the truck to physically deploy the devices to warn motorists.
Waymo LLC and Aurora Operations (NASDAQ: AUR) attempted a short-term resolution to the problem by petitioning FMCSA for an exemption to the regulations so that remotely deployed cab-mounted devices could be used instead. FMCSA denied the petition last month due to limited data on the effectiveness of the cab-mounted devices.
FMCSA acknowledged in its notice Tuesday that autonomous technology has “raised critical questions regarding potential barriers to regulatory compliance with warning device safety standards and regulations which reference or require a ‘driver.’
“In addition, alternative types of warning devices developed by industry, including those intended to increase driver safety during device deployment, have resulted in multiple applications for exemption from the corresponding safety regulations. These recent issues related to warning device requirements also call attention to the historically unresolved questions of whether the use of such devices improves traffic safety and, if so, how and to what extent.”
FMCSA also acknowledged in its notice that past attempts by regulators to assess the effectiveness of traditional roadside warning devices “yielded generally inconclusive or inconsistent results,” which could be why no data exists on the topic.
“FMCSA … itself has never conducted experimental research on the impact of using warning devices. As the only regulatory authority which still requires CMV operators to use warning devices, the responsibility to answer these questions finally and definitively is best charged to FMCSA.”
The agency plans to use GPS vehicle location and eye-tracking technology (to determine when passing motorists become aware of roadside warnings) in a controlled experiment at a closed-course driving research facility.
“The results of the study may support future rulemaking related to warning devices and provide baseline data necessary to inform agency decisions on exemption applications for alternative warning device products,” FMCSA stated.
