The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's top safety official has told the trucking industry what comes next from the regulator: more flexibility in the hours-of-service rules that govern how long truck drivers can work, a long-awaited update to the Safety Measurement System that scores carriers for enforcement, and a fix for the remaining failures of Motus, the new carrier-registration system whose troubled rollout has wrongly suspended some fleets. Chief Safety Officer Steve Dowling laid out the programme on October 28 at the 2026 WEX OTR Summit in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, in remarks reported by Transport Topics on October 30 and by Overdrive the same day. “One of the things that I love about FMCSA is our mission is really simple, and it's something that's easy to get behind. It's to reduce crashes, injuries, fatalities involving large trucks and buses,” Dowling told attendees.

Source: Transport Topics, Oct. 30, 2026

Dowling speaks from both sides of the cab door: he is a former California Highway Patrol commercial-vehicle enforcement officer who later served as a senior director of safety at Covenant Logistics, one of the large U.S. truckload fleets. That background framed the summit's central message — that FMCSA intends to keep rewriting rules it thinks no longer fit how fleets actually run, while tightening its grip on fraud, bad training schools and doctored driving logs. For the Punjabi owner-operators and small fleets who make up a large share of North American long-haul trucking — and who feel every change to driving hours, safety scores and registration in their pay and their paperwork — the three threads he described are the three that matter most.

Source: Overdrive, Oct. 30, 2026

Hours of service: flexibility is the direction

The hours-of-service (HOS) rules — the federal limits in 49 CFR Part 395 on driving time, the 14-hour duty window and required rest — are where Dowling promised the most movement. FMCSA already revised four HOS provisions in June 2026: the short-haul exception, the adverse driving conditions exception, the 30-minute break requirement and the sleeper berth provision. In the spring it also began two pilot programmes, one covering flexible sleeper berths and one covering split duty periods. Dowling's argument to the summit was philosophical as much as technical: the rules were built to fight fatigue, “because it has a direct correlation to safety. Being in compliance with the rules, you can still be fatigued,” he said. “However, on the flip side, just because that's what the rule is doesn't mean we don't need to look at it and see [if] there are other ways to accomplish it that work better with the industry and how you run your operations. So, that's one of the things that you're going to see coming out.”

Source: Transport Topics, Oct. 30, 2026

The two pilots show what “other ways” means in practice. As The Trucker reported from FMCSA's Federal Register notices of October 6 and 7, the Split Duty Period Pilot would let participating drivers pause the 14-hour driving window for up to three consecutive hours — time that can be spent off duty, in the berth, or on duty at a pickup or delivery, which would for the first time count detention time toward a pause. The Flexible Sleeper Berth Pilot would let drivers split their 10 hours of off-duty time into combinations such as 5/5 or 6/4, beyond today's 8/2 and 7/3 splits, with the longer period reduced to a minimum of five consecutive hours in the berth. FMCSA expects roughly 256 drivers in each 16-week study, comparing the same drivers under current rules and under the exemptions using surveys, vigilance tests, sleepiness ratings, wrist-worn sleep trackers, duty records and telematics. For most drivers nothing changes yet — the exemptions would apply only to pilot participants — and a permanent rule would require the studies, analysis and full rulemaking after them.

Source: The Trucker (FMCSA Federal Register notices, Oct. 6-7, 2026)

One piece of HOS flexibility is already live and already counted down: earlier in October, FMCSA expanded its temporary waiver for drivers hauling gasoline and diesel to include ethanol products and, in compartmentalised loads up to a limit, heating oil. The waiver — which this site has reported — expires December 16, in the middle of the winter fuel season.

Source: Transport Topics, Oct. 30, 2026

SMS: the score that decides who gets inspected

The second promise was an update to the Safety Measurement System (SMS), the scoring engine inside FMCSA's Compliance, Safety, Accountability programme that turns roadside inspections, violations and crashes into the scores insurers, brokers, shippers and enforcement officers use to judge a carrier. Dowling promised carriers and industry players that the agency would present its SMS proposals for comment and evaluation before adopting them. “Our goal is to have better identification of risks that are happening,” he said. “I've got a team that's working on that. It's never simple when you're applying it to an industry that's dynamic, correct?” Overdrive, which has tracked the SMS overhaul for years, noted Dowling returned to the same theme: “There are different factors within it, so we're looking at how we can use that to better identify risk.” No timetable or proposal text was released at the summit — the commitment is that proposals will come out for public comment in the coming weeks and months.

Source: Transport Topics; Overdrive, Oct. 30, 2026

Motus: 95% working, and an apology to the other 5%

The third thread was Motus, FMCSA's new online registration system — the system through which carriers obtain and maintain their operating authority. Dowling acknowledged the rollout “has had its challenges”: Overdrive catalogued small fleets' reports of incorrectly suspended authorities, incorrect insurance filings and inexplicable lockouts. His figure was that about 95% of carrier registration in Motus is now working correctly — and he refused to celebrate it. “That's not acceptable to us,” he said of the remaining 5%. “There are thousands of people that we're keeping out of the industry because we've initiated Motus” — a line he used for the system's fraud-prevention upside, since stricter identity checks are blocking fraudulent entrants — and he invited any attendee with a Motus problem to approach him in person: “I want you to come up and see me. I've got someone that will walk you through it… We are working for updates on that. We're not far away from that, but there's going to be more to come.” FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs, speaking Thursday at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies conference in Nashville, added the enforcement numbers behind the system, per Overdrive: Motus visibility has already produced 36 investigations that would not otherwise have started, many involving, in Barrs' words, “foreigners who used fake passports, using foreign funds,” trying to set up carriers. Barrs noted Congress required the new registration system 14 years ago and that the hard part is merging legacy data silos, some dating to the 1960s.

Source: Transport Topics; Overdrive, Oct. 30, 2026

The cleanup running underneath: training schools and ELDs

Dowling also updated the summit on the two cleanups this site has followed all year. Since December 2025, he said, FMCSA has removed more than 10,000 CDL trainers from its Training Provider Registry — including 110 schools removed in August whose removal has been questioned since — and prevented nearly 600 more from getting onto the list at all. “Now, when you look at the whole driver population, that's a small dent, but it's important to make sure that that focus is there,” he said. On electronic logging devices, the agency has removed more than 100 devices from its Registered ELD list since the beginning of 2025, and Dowling drew the line that matters to every driver whose dispatcher or safety department leans on the log book: “With hours-of-service rules, we want to know that they're compliant. You can't go in and edit logs by making a phone call… Anytime we hear of that, we go investigate and take appropriate enforcement action.” He closed the list with stronger technology oversight — “ELDs, vehicle technologies and safety systems” — and a phrase fleets repeat back to regulators at every conference: a level playing field, and the reminder that “safety is not a competition.”

Source: Overdrive, Oct. 30, 2026

What happens next

No rule changed on October 28 — this was a roadmap, not a rulemaking. The dated items ahead are: the fuel-haul HOS waiver expiring December 16; SMS proposals to be published for industry comment and evaluation in the coming weeks and months, per Dowling's promise; Motus updates he described as “not far away”; and the two HOS pilots moving forward toward their study phase, after which FMCSA would still need data analysis and formal rulemaking before any pause-the-clock or 5/5 sleeper flexibility becomes a general rule. Carriers who want a say in the SMS redesign will get it through the comment process Dowling committed to — the same channel through which trucking's Punjabi associations and small-fleet groups have filed on CDL and training rules all year.

Source: Transport Topics; Overdrive; The Trucker, Oct. 2026