Critics Again Ask U.S. Court to Void Driver Hours Rule

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

For the third time in five years, a coalition of interest groups has asked a federal court to overturn the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s rule governing the length of time truckers can drive and work.

And for the third time, American Trucking Associations has asked the court to permit it to join the fray and defend the rule.

The interest group coalition, led by Public Citizen, also asked Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to review the hours-of-service rule, which increases allowed daily driving time by one hour and permits drivers to reset their weekly limits after resting for 34 hours. The groups said the rule is detrimental to safety.

In a letter to LaHood, the coalition said that “longer driving and working hours are unsafe and promote driver fatigue.”

A spokesman for ATA, which filed its motion to intercede as a third party March 12, said those claims were “bogus.”

On March 9, the coalition, which also includes the Teamsters union, Citizens for Reliable and Safety Highways and Parents Against Tired Truckers, asked a federal appeals court to review the regulation — the first step in suing to have it overturned.

“FMCSA dealt with this claim just a month or two ago when they got the request from Public Citizen to reconsider the rule and . . . found that trucking is getting safer every year and has improved every year since the new hours-of-service rules went into effect,” ATA spokesman Clayton Boyce said.

A recent analysis by Transport Topics of the most recent data available from the Department of Transportation found that the frequency of fatal crashes fell for the third straight year in 2007 to the lowest point since the records have been kept.

“These groups continue to mislead the public and others, including Congress, about the nature of the hours-of-service regulation,” Boyce said. “They’re claiming the 34-hour restart allows ridiculous amounts of driving and on-duty time, and this is bogus. They continually push this one extra hour of driving, while never telling anyone that to get that extra hour of driving, the driver had to shorten his workday by at least one, possibly two hours, and increase the required rest time by at least two hours. So, on balance, the driver is much better rested.”

In 2003, FMCSA did the first revision of the original rule, then 64 years old, increasing the maximum driving time to 11 hours from 10 and reducing total work time to 14 consecutive hours from 15 hours. The rule also established a mandatory 10-hour off-duty period — two hours longer than the old rule required — and created a restart provision allowing drivers to reset their weekly hour allotments by taking 34 straight hours off.

Public Citizen successfully sued in 2004 to have that regulation overturned, arguing that FMCSA failed to properly consider the effect of the regulation on driver health.

In 2007, the agency reissued its regulation with some minor changes and more supporting evidence, but Public Citizen successfully challenged the rule once again.

In November, FMCSA republished the rule, leaving all the provisions the same as the 2007 version, but with more supporting evidence. That rule went into effect Jan. 19, the day before the Obama administration took office, after then-FMCSA Administrator John Hill rejected a request by Public Citizen to reconsider.

“The last administration completely disregarded the health and safety of truck drivers,” Teamsters union President James Hoffa said in a statement. “I’m confident President Obama will do better.”

The lawyer representing Public Citizen, Bonnie Robin-Vergeer, criticized FMCSA and the previous administration, saying that “insisting on the same flawed rule over and over is no substitute for complying with Congress’ mandates.”

“It is illogical and unacceptable that the prior administration’s solution to truck-driver fatigue was longer working and driving hours,” said Jackie Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “There needs to be a new rule.”

Joan Claybrook, former president of Public Citizen and now president of CRASH, argued that the current rule “put industry profits in the driver’s seat and public safety in the back seat. This needs to be reversed now.”

Bill Adams, a spokesman for DOT, said the department had received Public Citizen’s notice and that it was “under review.”