ATA Says HOS Changes Would Cut Wages, Cost Billions of Dollars in Lost Productivity

The federal government’s latest hours-of-service proposal will result in reduced wages for hundreds of thousands of truck drivers, significant costs for trucking companies and billions of dollars in lost productivity, American Trucking Associations told the Obama administration.

“These inefficiencies and costs would deal a serious and sustained blow to the huge ‘tangible goods’ economy that trucking supports, affecting not only shippers of freight, but ultimately consumers,” David Osiecki, ATA’s senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs, wrote in a Sept. 2 letter to Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.

The proposal also would impose “new and unwarranted costs” on state and local law enforcement agencies responsible for enforcing the rules, Osiecki said.

Osiecki urged the administration to “live up to its promise to relieve the burden of unnecessary regulations as it considers changes to the hours-of-service rules.”

Osiecki’s letter was sent in response to an Aug. 23 opinion column Sunstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal praising the administration’s plan to reduce regulatory burdens that he said will save billions of dollars and eliminate redundancy.

However, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which currently favors reducing driving time to 10 hours from the current 11, along with several other work-rule changes, has not said it has any plans to put the HOS proposal on the chopping block.

Instead, FMCSA has said it expects to announce its final rule by Oct. 26 and that the proposal provides more flexibility for drivers to take breaks. The proposal also will reduce health risks associated with long hours of driving, the agency said.

However, Osiecki said a new evaluation of a test run of FMCSA’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability program from 2008-2010 bolsters ATA’s argument for retaining the current HOS rule.

“. . . On Aug. 31, 2011, FMCSA released even further evidence demonstrating that compliance with current HOS rules is ‘strongly correlated with crash rates,’ ” Osiecki wrote. “In other words, carrier compliance with the current [HOS] rules is directly linked to safer trucking operations.”

The CSA operational test evaluation, conducted by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, concluded that crash rates were higher for carriers exceeding safety measurement system thresholds than for carriers not exceeding thresholds.

“The crash rate was highest for carriers exceeding the unsafe driving threshold,” the evaluation concluded.

The evaluation found that the CSA safety measurement system identified many more carriers for intervention than the SafeStat system — one of the program’s goals.

The four states participating in the operational test included Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, and New Jersey.

The UMTRI study also found that the effect of warning letters sent to carriers was likely one of the most significant findings in the evaluation.

“Twelve months after receiving a warning letter, safety measurement system results showed that 83% of test carriers had resolved identified safety problems and only 17% continued to have safety problems,” the evaluation stated.

In addition, UMTRI said CSA on-site focused investigations proved to be effective. Almost 20% fewer motor carriers continued to show safety problems 12 months after an on-site investigation, as compared with those receiving compliance reviews.

The evaluation also showed the number of carriers contacted through CSA interventions was about three times larger than under the previous model.

“Among the CSA test group, the annual percentage of motor carriers contacted was 9.9%, compared with the 3.2% of motor carriers that received full compliance reviews in 2009,” the study said.

The evaluation concluded there was a lag time in measureable safety performance improvement after CSA investigations, and for carriers with the most serious safety problems, improvement rates were similar to those of the study’s control group that did not receive interventions.