Blunt Expects Congress to Revisit HOS Suspension in Lame-Duck Session
The proposal, included in a fiscal 2015 transportation funding bill, calls for suspending for a year the requirement that drivers take off two consecutive periods of 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. during a 34-hour restart. It also would require the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to present Congress with a new study of the rule.
For Blunt, the “restart” rule is unsafe because it pushes some drivers to work during daylight driving times.
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“I became persuaded that the biggest problem this creates is you’re putting people on the road on the most dangerous time," Blunt told a lunch audience hosted by American Trucking Associations at the Management Conference & Exhibition on Oct. 5.
The senator, a senior transportation authorizer, added: “Regulation, and just things that don’t make sense, create bad results.”
The proposal, sponsored by Rep. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and backed by Blunt and others, was attached to the fiscal 2015 Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill that the Senate briefly considered on the floor this summer. Senate leaders pulled the bill from consideration after procedural disputes, and they have yet to say when they will again call it up.
ATA strongly backs Blunt’s efforts. Chris Spear, the federation’s chief of legislative affairs, explained at the same luncheon that the strategy of including the HOS proposal in an appropriations bill, instead of a highway bill, “is the quickest path to providing results” to the industry. Eventually, Spear added, ATA would push to include the proposal in a new highway policy bill. The current highway law, MAP-21, expires in May 2015.
