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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 34 / Tuesday, February 23, 2021 / Notices I. Public Participation A. Submitting Comments If you submit a comment, please include the docket number for this notice Docket No. FMCSA20210003, indicate the specific section of this document to which each comment applies, and provide a reason for each suggestion or recommendation. You may submit your comments and material online or by fax, mail, or hand delivery, but please use only one of these means. FMCSA recommends that you include your name and a mailing address, an email address, or a phone number in the body of your document so that FMCSA can contact you if there are questions regarding your submission.
To submit your comment online, go to http www.regulations.gov/docket?D=
FMCSA-2021-0003. Click on the Comment Now! button and type your comment into the text box on the following screen. Choose whether you are submitting your comment as an individual or on behalf of a third party and then submit.
If you submit your comments by mail or hand delivery, submit them in an unbound format, no larger than 812 by 11 inches, suitable for copying and electronic filing. If you submit comments by mail and would like to know that they reached the facility, please enclose a stamped, self-addressed postcard or envelope.
FMCSA will consider all comments and material received during the comment period.
B. Viewing Documents and Comments To view comments, as well as any documents mentioned in this notice as being available in the docket, go to http www.regulations.gov/
docket?D=FMCSA-2021-0003 and choose the document to review. If you do not have access to the internet, you may view the docket online by visiting Dockets Operations in Room W12140
on the ground floor of the DOT West Building, 1200 New Jersey Avenue SE, Washington, DC 205900001, between 9
a.m. and 5 p.m., ET, Monday through Friday, except Federal holidays. To be sure someone is there to help you, please call 202 3669317 or 202 366
9826 before visiting Dockets Operations.
C. Privacy Act In accordance with 5 U.S.C. 553c, DOT solicits comments from the public to better inform its rulemaking process.
DOT posts these comments, without edit, including any personal information the commenter provides, to www.regulations.gov, as described in
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the system of records notice DOT/ALL
14 FDMS, which can be reviewed at www.transportation.gov/privacy.
II. Background Under 49 U.S.C. 31136e and 31315b, FMCSA may grant an exemption from the FMCSRs for no longer than a 5-year period if it finds such exemption would likely achieve a level of safety that is equivalent to, or greater than, the level that would be achieved absent such exemption. The statute also allows the Agency to renew exemptions at the end of the 5-year period. FMCSA grants medical exemptions from the FMCSRs for a 2year period to align with the maximum duration of a drivers medical certification.
The 11 individuals listed in this notice have requested an exemption from the vision requirement in 49 CFR
391.41b10. Accordingly, the Agency will evaluate the qualifications of each applicant to determine whether granting an exemption will achieve the required level of safety mandated by statute.
The physical qualification standard for drivers regarding vision found in 391.41b10 states that a person is physically qualified to drive a CMV if that person has distant visual acuity of at least 20/40 Snellen in each eye without corrective lenses or visual acuity separately corrected to 20/40
Snellen or better with corrective lenses, distant binocular acuity of at least 20/40 Snellen in both eyes with or without corrective lenses, field of vision of at least 70 in the horizontal Meridian in each eye, and the ability to recognize the colors of traffic signals and devices showing standard red, green, and amber.
On July 16, 1992, the Agency first published the criteria for the Vision Waiver Program, which listed the conditions and reporting standards that CMV drivers approved for participation would need to meet 57 FR 31458. The current Vision Exemption Program was established in 1998, following the enactment of amendments to the statutes governing exemptions made by 4007 of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, Public Law 105
178, 112 Stat. 107, 401 June 9, 1998.
Vision exemptions are considered under the procedures established in 49 CFR
part 381 subpart C, on a case-by-case basis upon application by CMV drivers who do not meet the vision standards of 391.41b10.
To qualify for an exemption from the vision requirement, FMCSA requires a person to present verifiable evidence that he/she has driven a commercial vehicle safely in intrastate commerce
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with the vision deficiency for the past 3 years. Recent driving performance is especially important in evaluating future safety, according to several research studies designed to correlate past and future driving performance.
Results of these studies support the principle that the best predictor of future performance by a driver is his/her past record of crashes and traffic violations. Copies of the studies may be found at https www.regulations.gov/
docket?D=FMCSA-1998-3637.
FMCSA believes it can properly apply the principle to monocular drivers, because data from the Federal Highway Administrations FHWA former waiver study program clearly demonstrated the driving performance of experienced monocular drivers in the program is better than that of all CMV drivers collectively.1 The fact that experienced monocular drivers demonstrated safe driving records in the waiver program supports a conclusion that other monocular drivers, meeting the same qualifying conditions as those required by the waiver program, are also likely to have adapted to their vision deficiency and will continue to operate safely.
The first major research correlating past and future performance was done in England by Greenwood and Yule in 1920. Subsequent studies, building on that model, concluded that crash rates for the same individual exposed to certain risks for two different time periods vary only slightly See Bates and Neyman, University of California Publications in Statistics, April 1952.
Other studies demonstrated theories of predicting crash proneness from crash history coupled with other factors.
These factorssuch as age, sex, geographic location, mileage driven and conviction historyare used every day by insurance companies and motor vehicle bureaus to predict the probability of an individual experiencing future crashes See Weber, Donald C., Accident Rate Potential: An Application of Multiple Regression Analysis of a Poisson Process, Journal of American Statistical Association, June 1971. A 1964 California Driver Record Study prepared by the California Department of Motor Vehicles concluded that the best overall crash predictor for both concurrent and nonconcurrent events is the number of single convictions. This study used 3
consecutive years of data, comparing the experiences of drivers in the first 2 years with their experiences in the final year.
1 A thorough discussion of this issue may be found in a FHWA final rule published in the Federal Register on March 26, 1996 and available on the internet at https www.govinfo.gov/content/
pkg/FR-1996-03-26/pdf/96-7226.pdf.

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