FMCSA Will Meet Deadline on Hours Rule, Ferro Says

This story appears in the Jan. 18 print edition of Transport Topics.

WASHINGTON — Anne Ferro, head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, told Transport Topics the agency was committed to meeting its deadline to revise the driver hours-of-service rule.

Ferro, speaking briefly here following a session at the Transportation Research Board meeting, also said the agency’s work on drafting a new electronic onboard recorder proposal before it had even finalized the previous one was just a prudent regulatory decision.

“We have a great opportunity to get this [HOS] rule right,” Ferro said on Jan. 12, adding that overseeing the revision of the rule was “clearly one of my very top, near-term priorities.”

Ferro also said that FMCSA is “required by settlement to submit a strong draft rule . . . by July.”

Afterward, the new administrator told TT that strong, in this case, meant a “good product,” and that the agency intended to meet the stated deadline.

As part of that effort, Ferro will be “monitoring” four public listening sessions later this month — meetings in Arlington, Va., Dallas and Los Angeles that had been previously announced, and a fourth in Davenport, Iowa, that she announced would be held Jan. 28.

Ferro said the agency has “a very clear directive to open the process up, to make it a very public and open process.”

“I’m hopeful that we will get a broad range of perspective from users, consumers, regulators, enforcement folks . . . by reaching out to everybody and possibly turning over some rocks on some new areas of research,” she said.

In October, FMCSA settled the third lawsuit brought by a coalition of advocacy and labor groups aimed at overturning the regulations since they were revised in 2003.

Under that settlement, FMCSA is obligated to send a new proposal to the White House by July, and issue a new final rule in 2011.

A federal court has twice overturned all or portions of the rule — which in 2003 was modified to allow 11 hours of driving in a 14-hour workday, an increase of one driving hour and a reduction of one hour of on-duty time.

In a related rule, FMCSA is pre-paring a new proposal for the use of electronic onboard recorders.

The agency recently sent a final rule started under the Bush administration to the White House, but already is preparing a revision.

“As regulators, our obligation is to advance measures that will get us the soonest possible favorable impact on safety for users on the roadway, and to the extent that this is a two-part stra-tegy to do that,” Ferro said of the agency’s plans on EOBRs.

According to a Department of Transportation report, the new EOBR proposal has already slipped from its original schedule.

In December, the rule was on pace for September publication, but the January version of a DOT report says it should be out in December.

The agency’s plan got an endorsement from Ferro’s predecessor, John Hill.

“The scope needed to be broadened,” Hill said of the final EOBR rule that the agency was working on before he left office early last year.

The rule needed to go further, he said, and requiring more carriers to use the technology “should resolve the hours-of-service issue.”

“That’s the part we need to focus on,” Hill said, rather than on the structure of the hours rule itself.

“There are so many different interest groups, it is a no-win situation,” he said. “It will just continue to sap the energy of the agency from moving on to doing other safety items they should be doing.”