OMB Approves NHTSA Automated Driving System ICR

Yesterday the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) announced that it had approved an information collection request (ICR) revision from the DOT’s National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) on “Automated Driving Systems 2.0: A Vision for Safety”. The revised burden estimate shows a decrease in the number of reports and the number of expected burden hours.

The table below shows the change in the burden estimate.

 

NHTSA reported that:

“The currently approved collection estimated 20 respondents per year, each responding once in that year. The burden associated with disclosure recommendations via a VSSA would be 600 hours per respondent. The annual burden associated with the information collection was calculated as 12,000 hours and $1,168,320 in labor costs. The revisions estimate four entities will publish a VSSA every year and will publish only once in the three-year period. This decrease is a result of review of the submissions for the currently approved collection and a review of the entities currently in the Automated Driving System industry.”

OMB Approves two Automated Driving Rules

Earlier this week the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) approved two advanced notices of proposed rulemaking (ANPRMs) from DOT agencies starting the regulatory process on two separate automated vehicle regulatory actions. The first was a rulemaking from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) on “Removing Regulatory Barriers for Automated Driving Systems”. The second was from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) on “Safe Integration of Automated Driving Systems-Equipped Commercial Motor Vehicles”.

Both of these rulemaking submissions were approved pretty quickly. The NHTSA ANPRM was submitted on March 14^th, 2019 and the FMCSA ANPRM on March 21^st, 2019. ANPRM’s are the first step in the rulemaking process and typically propose a list of questions that the agency would like answered by the regulated and affected communities before they actually propose regulatory action.

There is no telling when these ANPRMs will actually be published in the Federal Register. There is no procedural reason that it should be more than a couple of days, Both rulemakings were approved by OIRA ‘consistent with change’ so I suspect that it will probably be at least a month before these ANPRMs are published given the rulemaking history of the Trump Administration.

NHTSA Sends Automated Driving ANPRM to OMB

On Saturday the DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) to the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review. According to the Spring 2018 Unified Agenda entry for this rulemaking NHTSA is looking for “public comments on NHTSA's progress in developing proposals for the establishment of a pilot research program for the safe on-road testing and development of the emerging advanced vehicle safety technologies, especially automated driving systems”.

With the number of publicly reported incidents involving accidents with automated driving vehicles on public streets, it would seem that NHTSA is more than a little late with this proposed rulemaking.