By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the Feb. 13 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Federal regulators will not issue a final rule this year mandating electronic onboard recorders for nearly all interstate carriers, a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration spokeswoman confirmed last week.
Instead, an FMCSA spokeswoman said, the agency probably will not even issue a supplemental — or second — proposed rule until “late 2012 or early 2013.”
The EOBR rulemaking process originally included a 2010 final rule for roughly 5,000 carriers with serious hours-of-service compliance violations, and a separate proposed rule issued in January 2011 for an estimated 500,000 interstate carriers.
The remedial EOBR final rule was originally set to take effect in June 2012 but was struck down in August by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, which ruled FMCSA failed to ensure that the devices would not be used to harass truck drivers.
As a result, the agency in November dropped the remedial rule, and has sought to revise its proposed EOBR rule for interstate truckers.
FMCSA said it will, in effect, consolidate the two rules into a universal proposed mandate for nearly all interstate carriers with new language intended to address the courts’ driver harassment concerns.
The rulemaking delay was first mentioned in a speech earlier this month at the Mid-West Trucking Association convention in Peoria, Ill. On Feb. 3, FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro told conference attendees the agency would not issue an anticipated final EOBR mandate rule this year, according to Don Schaefer, executive director of the MWTA.
Speaking at a session of the Transportation Research Board last month, Ferro said FMCSA plans to schedule “listening sessions” to gather input for the proposed mandate (1-30, p. 16).
“We have an opportunity in the months ahead to do a series of listening sessions to learn more from drivers and carriers and others what is meant by ‘harassment’,” Ferro told TRB attendees.
The agency will incorporate technological recommendations from the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Board and other information it has gathered throughout the previous rulemakings, she said.
“We will work very aggressively to continue to advance an electronic onboard recorder rule that makes sense,” Ferro said.
