Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations

<RULE> DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION <SUBAGY>Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration</SUBAGY> <CFR>49 CFR Chapter III</CFR> <DEPDOC>[Docket No. FMCSA-2024-0201]</DEPDOC> <RIN>RIN 2126-AC66</RIN> <SUBJECT>Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), Department of Transportation (DOT). <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Final rule; general technical, organizational, conforming, and correcting amendments. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> FMCSA amends its regulations by making technical corrections throughout the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations (FMCSRs). The Agency makes minor changes to correct inadvertent errors and omissions, remove or update obsolete references, and improve the clarity and consistency of certain regulatory provisions. The Agency also makes a change to its rules of organization, procedures, and practice. Because the rule does not impose any new material requirements or increase compliance obligations, it is issued without prior notice and opportunity for comment, pursuant to the good cause exception in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> Effective November 18, 2024. Petitions for Reconsideration of this final rule must be submitted to the FMCSA Administrator no later than December 18, 2024. </EFFDATE> <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Mr. Nicholas Lockhart, Regulatory Development Division, Office of Policy, FMCSA, 1200 New Jersey Avenue SE, Washington, DC 20590-0001; (202) 366-2219; <E T="03">nicholas.lockhart@dot.gov.</E> </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> <HD SOURCE="HD1">I. Legal Basis for the Rulemaking</HD> Congress delegated certain powers to regulate interstate commerce to DOT in numerous pieces of legislation, most notably in section 6 of the Department of Transportation Act (DOT Act) (Pub. L. 89-670, 80 Stat. 931, 937, Oct. 15, 1966). Section 6 of the DOT Act transferred to DOT the authority of the former Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to regulate the qualifications and maximum hours of service of employees, the safety of operations, and the equipment, of motor carriers in interstate commerce (80 Stat. 939). This authority, first granted to the ICC in the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 (Pub. L. 74-255, 49 Stat. 543, Aug. 9, 1935), now appears in 49 U.S.C. chapter 315. The regulations issued under this authority, as well as subsequently enacted laws, became known as the FMCSRs, codified at 49 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) parts 350-399. The administrative powers to enforce chapter 315 (codified in 49 U.S.C. chapter 5) were also transferred from the ICC to DOT in 1966, assigned first to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and then to FMCSA. The FMCSA Administrator, whose powers and duties are set forth in 49 U.S.C. 113, has been delegated authority by the Secretary of Transportation (the Secretary) under 49 CFR 1.81 to prescribe regulations and to exercise authority over and with respect to any personnel within the organization, and under 49 CFR 1.87 to carry out the motor carrier functions vested in the Secretary. Between 1984 and 1999, enforcement of the FMCSRs, the Hazardous Materials Regulations, and the Commercial Regulations was added to FHWA's authority. The statutes granting these authorities include the Motor Carrier Safety Act of 1984 (Pub. L. 98-554, Title II, 98 Stat. 2832, Oct. 30, 1984), codified at 49 U.S.C. chapter 311, subchapter III; the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1986 (Pub. L. 99-570, Title XII, 100 Stat. 3207-170, Oct. 27, 1986), codified at 49 U.S.C. chapter 313; the Hazardous Materials Transportation Uniform Safety Act of 1990, as amended (Pub. L. 101-615, 104 Stat. 3244, Nov. 16, 1990), codified at 49 U.S.C. chapter 51; the Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act of 1991 (Pub. L. 102-143, Title V, 105 Stat. 917, 952, Oct. 28, 1991), codified at 49 U.S.C. 31306; the ICC Termination Act of 1995 (Pub. L. 104-88, 109 Stat. 803, Dec. 29, 1995), codified at 49 U.S.C. chapters 131-149; and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (Pub. L. 105-178, 112 Stat. 107, June 9, 1998). The Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999 (Pub. L. 106-159, 113 Stat. 1748, Dec. 9, 1999) established FMCSA as a new operating administration within DOT, effective January 1, 2000, and transferred authorities specifically related to commercial motor vehicle safety to FMCSA. Accordingly, since that time the motor carrier safety, and certain commercial, responsibilities previously assigned to both the ICC and FHWA have been the jurisdiction of FMCSA. These responsibilities also include regulations relating to section 18 of the Noise Control Act of 1972, codified at 42 U.S.C. 4917, which were originally assigned to the Secretary of Transportation (Pub. L. 92-574, 86 Stat. 1249, Oct. 27, 1972) and delegated to FHWA (39 FR 7791, Feb. 28, 1974), and are now the jurisdiction of FMCSA, as codified at 49 U.S.C. 113(f)(1). <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>  Responsibility for the regulations related to section 18 of the Noise Control Act was given to FMCSA by Congress in section 101 of the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act (Pub. L. 106-159, 113 Stat. 1748, 1750, Dec. 9, 1999). </FTNT> Congress subsequently expanded, modified, and amended FMCSA's authority in the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (Pub. L. 107-56, 115 Stat. 272, Oct. 26, 2001); the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) (Pub. L. 109-59, 119 Stat. 1144, Aug. 10, 2005); the SAFETEA-LU Technical Corrections Act of 2008 (Pub. L. 110-244, 122 Stat. 1572, June 6, 2008); the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) (Pub. L. 112-141, 126 Stat. 405, July 6, 2012); Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (Pub. L. 114-94, 129 Stat. 1312, Dec. 4, 2015); and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Pub. L. 117-58, 135 Stat. 429, Nov. 15, 2021). The specific regulations amended by this rule are based on the statutes detailed above. Generally, the legal authority for each of those provisions was explained when the requirement was originally adopted and is noted at the beginning of each part in Title 49 of the CFR. The APA specifically provides exceptions to its notice and comment rulemaking procedures when an agency finds there is good cause to dispense with them, and incorporates the finding, and a brief statement of reasons therefore, in the rules issued (5 U.S.C. 553(b)(B)). Good cause exists when an agency determines that notice and public comment procedures are impractical, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest. The amendments made in this final rule primarily correct inadvertent errors and omissions, remove or update obsolete references, and make minor language changes to improve clarity and consistency. The technical amendments do not impose any new material requirements or increase compliance obligations. For these reasons, FMCSA finds good cause that notice and public comment on this final rule are unnecessary. In addition to amendments that fall within the APA good cause exception, this rule also contains amendments that fall within the APA exception for rules of agency organization, procedure, or practice. Specifically, the Agency amends 49 CFR 387.307(e) to align with the service rules in part 386 and to specify the same procedures for Agency review of documents filed by brokers notified of a pending suspension of operating authority due to insufficient financial responsibility as are followed by the Agency when such brokers file documents in support of a reinstatement from suspension. These amendments fall within the exception to the APA's notice and comment rulemaking procedures for “rules of agency organization, procedure, or practice,” (5 U.S.C. 553(b)(A)) because the procedures for filing such documents are already specified in § 387.307(e) and so are made clearer with this amendment. Similarly, an amendment to part 389 also concerns matters of Agency policy. These changes are therefore excepted from the notice and public comment requirements. The APA also allows agencies to make rules effective immediately with good cause (5 U.S.C. 553(d)(3)), instead of requiring publication 30 days prior to the effective date. For the reasons already stated, FMCSA finds there is good cause for this rule to be effective immediately. This rule contains numerous, unrelated provisions that focus on unique aspects of FMCSA's regulations. Therefore, FMCSA finds that the various provisions of this final rule are severable and able to operate functionally if severed from each other. In the event a court were to invalidate one or more of this final rule's unique provisions, the remaining provisions should stand. <HD SOURCE="HD1">II. Section-by-Section Analysis</HD> <HD SOURCE="HD2">A. Part 350—Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program (MCSAP) and High Priority Program</HD> FMCSA amends part 350 to eliminate the current question-and-answer format in favor of standard styling. Thus, all section headings that are phrased as questions will be rephrased as brief descriptive phrases pertaining to the section's content. However, unless specifically described below, this change does not affect the body text of the regulations in this part. FMCSA makes this change because it has determined that the question-and-answer format is cumbersome, difficult to read, and may cause confusion. Moreover, in several instances the title of a section is styled as a question, but the regulatory text does not provide a concise answer to the question asked, somewhat defeating the purpose of the question-and-answer style. Part 350 previously had section head ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 124k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━