Hill Defends EOBR Proposal Amid Criticism

By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter

This story appears in the May 7 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

WASHINGTON — John Hill, head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, last week defended the agency’s proposal to require electronic onboard re-corders on only habitual violators of federal hours-of-service regulations.

Hill, testifying to the surface transportation subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, was criticized by safety advocates, law enforcement, industry officials and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), the panel’s chairman.

“I’m perplexed as to why the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration proposed in January to require recorders on as few as 465 of the more than 700,000 trucking companies in this country,” Lautenberg said. “I’m not sure the industry itself could have written a more favorable proposal if they choose not to be concerned with this. We need EOBRs on every truck on the road to ensure the safety of our truck drivers and the families who travel on the highways.”

Lautenberg said, “The paper logbook system for recording driver time is outdated, easy to falsify and it fails to ensure safety, but there’s an existing technology available to better enforce our safety laws. An electronic onboard recorder can help prevent tragedies by giving trucking companies and law enforcement officials a way to enforce hours of service.”

Earlier this year, FMCSA proposed requiring carriers with hours-of-service violation rates in excess of 10% over a two-year period to install EOBRs to monitor their drivers’ hours, and provide various regulatory incentives to all carriers to voluntarily install the technology (1-15, p. 1).

During the May 1 hearing, Hill said FMCSA’s regulation “targets unsafe companies,” and the agency has proposed “a risk-based approach to target these carriers.”

“Based on our safety research, motor carriers whose drivers continuously violate the hours of service have an increased probability of being involved in fatigue-related crashes,” he said. “The carriers that would be required under the proposal to use EOBRs have crash ratings that are 87% higher than the overall industry average.”

Lautenberg took issue with FMCSA’s approach, questioning why the agency did not at least require the devices on all new trucks.

“Frankly, that’s how we got airbags into cars,” he said. “We ought to get it out there and propose it as a requirement for new vehicles.”

Mark Rosenker, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the board “felt [FMCSA’s proposal] fell short.”

“The board believes that onboard recorder technology should be applied to all carriers, rather than only carriers that are pattern violators,” Rosenker said. “It seems extremely unlikely that the unscrupulous carriers who already play fast and loose with their logbooks would voluntarily comply.”

“FMCSA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should work to make EOBRs standard equipment sometime on the order of three to five years,” said Capt. John Harrison, president of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.

Jerry Gabbard, vice president of commercial vehicles for Siemens VDO in North America,  criticized FMCSA’s proposal for relying on a flawed cost-benefit analysis. Gabbard said the agency made its analysis based on a $1,200 unit, while “a minimally compliant” device would cost $350 to $400.

Hill said one of the reasons FMCSA did not go forward with a full mandate was because “it’s going to be difficult to put a rule forward that allows us to show some benefit with an industrywide mandate,” based on its cost-benefit analysis.

Dick Reiser, general counsel for Werner Enterprises, told the committee that while Werner has been using a paperless log system for several years, “we have not been able to quantify” any safety benefit.

“We have not been able to say because we put this in, we are seeing a better accident rate than we had before,” he said.

Reiser said FMCSA should test the technology to get “sound evidence that EOBRs lead to safety improvements.”

“This data,” he said, “will increase the credibility of EOBR systems and the prospect for adoption of the technology by motor carriers.”

Anne McCartt, senior vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said because the rule does not mandate EOBRs for all trucks “if finalized, [it] will be a travesty.”

McCartt also told the committee that “carriers who are using these devices tend to have good safety records already.”

“They are already obeying the rules and already have low crash rates and maybe for them onboard recorders won’t make a significant difference,” she said.