Safety Management Systems in U.S. Trucking: Gaps Between Regulatory Requirements and Operational Practice

Abstract

Commercial trucking fatalities in the United States have increased over the past decade despite a progressively tightening regulatory environment, suggesting a fundamental misalignment between what federal safety rules mandate and what carriers implement in practice. This article investigates the misalignment across three interconnected domains: hours-of-service regulation, electronic logging device mandates, and driver physiological monitoring technology. Through a structured comparative review of peer-reviewed empirical literature and a technical evaluation of existing driver monitoring architectures against a novel multimodal Adaptive Physiological Impairment Monitoring System (APIMS), the study identifies five operational dimensions on which current regulatory instruments and commercially deployed technologies fail to address the documented risks of fatigue and pharmacological impairment. The APIMS integrates five passively acquired sensing modalities, a five-class impairment taxonomy, individualized federated baseline calibration, a four-tier automated intervention cascade, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication within a privacy-protective architecture. On a dataset of 1,247 simulator sessions, the system achieved an area-under-curve of 0.973, a sensitivity of 94.7 percent at a specificity of 96.8 percent, and a mean detection latency of 1.77 seconds. These results indicate that physiologically grounded, real-time impairment detection is technically mature, yet its integration into operational safety management remains obstructed by the absence of relevant federal performance standards.