Trucking News: Industry Groups Unite Inopposition of Hours-Of-Service Rules

Trucking news: Industry groups unite inopposition of hours-of-service rules

ATA maintains current rules are safe and effective

Jeff Berman, Group News Editor -- Logistics Management, 3/11/2009

WASHINGTON—A consortium of organizations has banded together in an attempt to overturn the hours-of-service (HOS) regulations governing approximately 3 million long-haul truck drivers.

These organizations—including The Teamsters, Public Citizen, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the Truck Safety Coalition called on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court to overturn the HOS regulations and also penned a letter to Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, explaining their position on how the HOS regulations increase the amount of time truck drivers can spend on the road and their desire for a new version of HOS rules that they say would reduce truck crashes caused by fatigue.

“We have taken this action with conviction based on research and scientific data, that longer driving and working hours are unsafe and promote driver fatigue,” said the letter to LaHood.

The letter added that the consortium also challenged the two major features of the HOS rule “that promote even greater driving fatigue”: the provision increasing permissible consecutive driving hours from 10 hours to 11 hours and the 34-hour re-start provision, too, which it said enables drivers to drive and work substantially longer hours per week than under the HOS rules that were in effect until the rule was changed by the Bush administration in 2003 and took effect in January 2004.

This development follows a November 2008 announcement by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA, in which it indicated it would maintain the current HOS regulations, which essentially concluded an eight-year legal and procedural debate on HOS regulations, which went largely unchanged from 1935 until FMCSA offered its first revision in 2000.

In one of the final truck-related regulations issued by the Bush administration, the FMCSA said it was adopting as final its interim rule from December 17, 2007, which allows drivers to drive 11 hours within a 15-hour workday with a 34-hour restart provision. Drivers are limited to 60 hours of driving in seven days, or 70 in eight days, while allowing those clocks to be reset by taking 34 straight off-duty hours. The previous rule had allowed for ten hours of driving in a 15-hour period, but allowed drivers to log on and off duty whenever they wanted.

These rules took effect on January 19, the final day of the Bush administration.

“There have been procedural rules that have been identified by the court…we are properly addressing the concerns of the court,” said FMCSA Administrator in a January conference call. “I feel confident that moving forward is the best public policy at this time.

Hill also said that he decided to propose keeping the current rules rather than create confusion within the trucking industry and the enforcement community by issuing further revisions.

And in July 2007, a ruling made by a three-judge panel in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned the 11-hour daily driving limit and 34-hour restart period that had been in place since October 1, 2005, as well as re-set the HOS clock to 10 hours of maximum driving time each day.

The American Trucking Associations(ATA) took the consortium to task, saying in a statement that trucks are safer now—while operating under the HOS rules that came into play in 2004—and they supported this sentiment by noting that the rates of truck-involved fatal crashes and injuries have declined every year since the current HOS rules took effect.

The ATA added that these rules reduced the maximum length of the truck driver’s work day by at least one hour and increased the daily required number of hours of rest by two hours. It also said that the work day of a driver was shortened from a previous maximum of 15 hours—that could be extended by breaks—to no more than 14 consecutive hours. Drivers are required to rest at least 10 hours between shifts, with at least eight of those hours in the sleeper berth if it is used while on the road, and within the shorter work day, the rules allow 11 hours of driving instead of the previous 10, said the ATA.

The ATA also questioned the consortium’s claim that the 34-hour restart allows “significantly longer driving and on-duty times in a week than the pre-2004 rules. It cited findings from the FMCSA that indicated “longer hypothetical hours in driving and duty schedules” envisioned by critics “requires an imaginary world with nearly perfect logistics.” In the real world, said the ATA, drivers have found that the 34-hour restart gives them more rest and time off, not less.

ATA President and CEO Bill Graves has previously stated that if the 11-hour driving rule and 34-hour restart provision were to be vacated, the impact on trucking operations would be severe. Graves said that ATA members have told him “quite clearly” that if the rule reduced driving time their trucking operations would clearly have to change, because many members that have already changed elements of their operations because of HOS rules would now have to change operations again. And potential impacts of fewer hours on the road, according to Graves, include: carriers having to move drivers from one location to another, move facilities, re-engineer networks (on the LTL side), as well as costs, training, and contracts and service ramifications as well.