ATA Seeks DOT Meeting to Discuss Future of HOS

This story appears in the Nov. 16 print edition of Transport Topics.

American Trucking Associations has requested a meeting with Department of Transportation officials to discuss the agency’s intention to revise federal driver work rules issued during the Bush administration.

In a letter signed by ATA President Bill Graves, the federation outlined reasons why the hours-of-service regulation should be maintained. DOT said it would write a new HOS rule after advocacy groups agreed to suspend their lawsuit challenging it (click here for previous story).

The HOS rewrite will be directed by newly appointed Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration head Anne Ferro, former president of the Maryland Motor Truck Association.

ATA “is extremely perplexed with the decision by . . . [DOT] to review and reconsider the current hours-of-service rules,” Graves wrote.

Putting the rule back under review, he said, creates “uncertainty” for trucking companies and “is wholly unwarranted, given the consistent and significant highway safety improvements made by the trucking industry under the current rules.”

Citing statistics from DOT, Graves said that the truck-involved fatal crash rate dropped 9% between 2004 and 2007, the latest year for which full data are available, and the number of truck-involved fatalities has dropped 8%.

“The current rule is working as USDOT intended,” Graves said. “It is saving lives.”

Requests for comment from FMCSA were not returned.

FMCSA and DOT announced Oct. 26 they would review and revise the HOS rule, would send a new proposal to the White House by July and would publish a new final rule by August 2011.

The driver hours-of-service rule has been the center of debate among FMCSA and industry and advocacy groups since 2003, when the agency issued the first revision in the regulation in more than 60 years.

The HOS revisions extended allowable driving time to 11 hours from 10 hours and permitted drivers to reset their weekly maximum work hours after taking a 34-hour break. The rule also cut one hour from the total allowable work day.

Federal courts overturned the rule twice, citing driver health and safety and improper procedures by FMCSA. The agreement to revise the rule ends a third legal challenge by labor and advocacy groups, which have succeeded twice in getting federal courts to reject the new regulation.

Revising the hours rule moves to the top of an already crowded rulemaking agenda, so much so that some industry officials are worried that other programs may suffer as a result.

“To do it in the time frame that they’re being asked is going to take some resources,” said Steve Keppler, interim executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance. “Their tails are being worked off, and adding these things to their plate certainly doesn’t help that situation.”

Keppler said that “certainly . . . other things will be impacted as a result, whether it’s other rulemakings or other programs or other things.”

Rod Nofziger, director of government affairs for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, said FMCSA has been overtaxed consistently with tasks to complete.

“Since its inception, the agency has always had a very full, if not overflowing, plate,” he told Transport Topics.

Besides the hours-of-service rule, FMCSA is working on a series of delayed and new regulations.

The agency was expected to publish a rule governing the use of electronic onboard recorders before the Bush administration left office in 2008, but the regulation languished.

The new leadership at DOT has been reviewing the rule, which could mandate EOBRs for some carriers, but it is not expected to be published until early 2010.

FMCSA also has been tasked with drafting rules to ban text messaging by commercial drivers, a cause DOT Secretary Ray LaHood has pushed.

Besides that issue, the agency is working on creating a database for positive drug and alcohol test results, a proposal that had been slated for the third quarter of 2010, but that project has been pushed back to next November.

FMCSA plans to roll out a new safety-fitness system, CSA 2010, in June next year after several years of testing. The original schedule for the program, according to a DOT report, would have had it in place in June 2008.