FMCSA, Trucking Chided in Senate Hearing

This story appears in the May 3 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was criticized during a Senate subcommittee hearing last week for not doing enough to clamp down on unsafe trucks, particularly with regard to driver hours of service.

During the April 28 hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee’s panel on surface transportation, the industry was chided for seeking permission to operate larger trucks — a position opposed by the subcommittee chairman, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), as well as various other interest groups.

“The Obama administration has made the right move by initiating a new rulemaking on driver hours,” Lautenberg said as he opened the hearing. “But let’s be clear: When this process is over, we cannot wind up with the same flawed regulations that the last administration designed.”

FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro told Lautenberg and the subcommittee that the agency was on pace to have its revised hours rule proposal submitted to the White House for review by July.

She said that the nearly half-dozen listening sessions FMCSA has sponsored around the country, as well as the docket it has opened for research and comment, have “given us a wide range of perspectives.”

Dave Osiecki, American Trucking Associations’ senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs, told the subcommittee that the present HOS rule “is working and should be retained relatively unchanged.”

Osiecki said there has been a steady decline in truck-related fatalities since the rule’s basic framework was adopted in 2004.

Jackie Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, said the decline was unrelated to the hours-of-service rule.

Gillan said that declines in fatalities “always coincide with periods of economic downturn . . . and we are concerned that this dip is temporary.”

During the hearing, Lautenberg pressed on the driving-hours issue, but Francis “Buzzy” France, an administrator with the Maryland State Police and president of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, vouched for the rule’s efficacy.

“The results that we’re seeing over the past few years seem to substantiate . . . that it has substantially increased our safety,” he said. “I’m fairly comfortable with what we have.”

Lautenberg also pressed FMCSA on why it offered only a limited electronic onboard recorder rule, rather than the sweeping industrywide mandate favored by advocacy groups and the National Transportation Safety Board.

The New Jersey senator said FMCSA’s recent rule was “a modest improvement” but that “EOBRs should be installed on every truck and bus.”

Ferro said that work was under way to develop a broader EOBR rule, but Lautenberg continued to push.

“While the rule was an improvement, it captures a very small percentage, just over 1% of carriers,” he told Ferro. “Why hasn’t your agency issued a more comprehensive EOBR mandate?”

Ferro replied that “it was clear from the original [proposal] that we were constrained.” She added that, even though the new rule applied to only a few carriers, it was a “tool we have today . . . so we needed to deploy the tool.”

NTSB Chairwoman Debbie Hersman said that because “no hours-of-service rule is adequate unless it is enforceable,” the board continues to favor a universal mandate for EOBRs, as it has since 1977.

Hersman also criticized FMCSA’s inability to respond to other NTSB recommendations on issues ranging from EOBRs to medical regulations.

“We want to see a lot less talk and a little more action,” she said. NTSB, as a part of the Department of Transportation, cannot write its own regulations and instead makes recommendations to FMCSA and other regulatory agencies within the department.

Lautenberg, along with Gillan, also pounded the trucking industry over the issue of increasing truck size and weight, calling larger, heavier trucks unsafe.

Lautenberg repeatedly has introduced legislation as the Safe Highways and Infrastructure Preservation Act, which would expand the current freeze on truck size increases on the Interstate Highway System to the entire National Highway System.

Osiecki said ATA believed that “a ‘just say no’ answer is not appropriate.” A recent study of larger trucks from the Federal Highway Administration, he said, found the safety record for the bigger rigs “is more than 100 times better” than the industry at large.

“We don’t think safety and more productive trucks are mutually exclusive,” he said.

France told the panel that CVSA opposes increasing truck weight until more data are available about their safety record, and the group proposes “strengthening the two pilot programs” in Maine and Vermont to allow heavy trucks, where state and federal officials “have begun to conduct meaningful data.”