ATRI Challenges FMCSA Over Cost of HOS Changes

This story appears in the June 24 print edition of Transport Topics.

The federal government has grossly overstated the financial benefits of changes to the 34-hour restart provision in the hours-of-service rule, and they will actually cost fleets $189 million a year, according to a new study by the American Transportation Research Institute.

A previous cost-benefit analysis by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on the restart provision estimated the trucking industry would gain $133 million a year.

FMCSA’s analysis of the entire rule showed a benefit of $205 million for truckers.

“ATRI’s findings call into question the credibility of FMCSA’s analysis,” Steve Williams, chairman and CEO of Maverick USA, said at a congressional hearing June 18.

“What we quantified in the study was a $322 million delta between the purported benefits that FMCSA identified and the actual industry costs that we believe will be experienced,” Rebecca Brewster, ATRI’s president, told Transport Topics after the hearing.

Beginning July 1, two new restrictions will be placed on restarts, which drivers can use to reset their weekly clocks. Drivers will be able to use the restart only once every seven days, and any restart must include two rest periods from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.

The rule change also mandates a 30-minute rest break before truckers can drive more than eight hours. ATRI’s research looked at only the restart provisions.

Brewster said the difference in cost-benefit analyses was mainly due to the set of data used by ATRI.

“FMCSA based their decision on the regulatory impact analysis that used 2007 field survey data, which was using logbook data from carriers undergoing compliance reviews,” Brewster said. However, she said carriers undergoing reviews are usually “bad actors” who had attracted the attention of enforcement agencies.

FMCSA’s data showed that 15% of drivers used the restart during the test, and they used it to maximize their driving hours. That meant that changes to the restart would affect only a small portion of drivers and only drivers who were trying to push the limits of the rule anyway.

But ATRI used logbooks from more than 40,000 drivers, which Brewster said reflected a more normal set of industry practices. They found that many drivers use the restart, and they use it to increase flexibility, not to squeeze in more hours.

ATRI also included costs from congestion and delays because the new restart restrictions would make nighttime driving harder.

“What FMCSA missed completely are the costs that are going to accrue to everybody else,” Brewster said.

FMCSA spokesman Duane DeBruyne declined to comment on the study.

But after giving her own testimony defending the HOS rule at a Capitol Hill hearing last week, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said her agency has been working for 10 months to make sure law enforcement and the trucking industry are ready.

The agency has been “getting good logbook examples on our website, adding to those examples, continuing to build out the [questions] on the website that are specific to hours of service, adding not just the logbook examples but updating the guide on complying with the hours of service,” Ferro told TT.

More recently, FMCSA published visor cards describing the changes, designed as a small placard truckers could keep in their vehicles.

To Ferro, enforcement and industry seem ready for the changes.

“Will there be some errors in enforcement? Probably. That’s the case with federal motor carrier safety rules, regardless,” she said.

Stephen Keppler, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, said officers will not provide a grace period for compliance but will use enforcement to educate drivers.

“With any rule change, you’re going to have hiccups. There’s going to be a transition periods,” he said. “So I suspect we’ll have some of that for some period of time. How long that is, it’s hard to say at this point.”