It’s official: The 2013 HOS restart rules are no more.

The 2013 version of the 34-hour restart rule required drivers to be off-duty for two periods from 1AM to 5AM before they could go back to work, and the restart could only be used once per week.

A poll of DAT TruckersEdge readers showed that 73% of them use the 34-hour restart on a weekly basis, so the 1-5AM provision forced a lot of truckers to operate during high-traffic times. That led to a big loss in productivity for most carriers.

Those rules were suspended in December of 2014, but whether or not that suspension was going to be permanent had been a question hanging over the industry ever since.

The FMCSA and Virginia Tech conducted a safety review to determine whether or not to go back to the 2013 version of the restart rules. Ultimately, they found that the 2013 version of the restart rule wasn’t any safer than the version of the rule that everyone is using now, so the current version of the rule is what’s going to stay in place.