HOS Restart Change Is Law

This story appears in the Dec. 22 & 29 print edition of Transport Topics. The trucking industry’s long-sought suspension of last year’s changes to the hours-of-service restart provision became reality last week as President Obama signed a $1 trillion fiscal 2015 funding bill.

The law includes the amendment from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that suspends through Sept. 30 the requirement that drivers seeking to restart their weekly clocks take off two consecutive periods of 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. The amendment also requires the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to report to Congress about the restart rule’s health claims.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: On restart changes

FMCSA confirmed on its website that it has suspended the “requirements regarding the restart of a driver’s 60- or 70-hour limit that drivers were required to comply with” since July 1, 2013.

Separately, the agency said in a statement to Transport Topics that it is working to “ensure that the 12,000 state and federal motor carrier enforcement personnel are prepared to revert back to the previous restart.”

Truckers are still required to account for a 30-minute break during their shifts and adhere to all other pre-July 2013 HOS regulations.

American Trucking Associations Chairman Duane Long wasn’t pleased when the new restart rule took effect.

Long, chairman of Longistics, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, said, “Fleets from around the country, including mine, tried to tell FMCSA that the previous rules were working just fine and that these new restart provisions were going to cause unintended problems.”

However, Stephen Keppler, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, told TT the sudden change could present challenges.

“To really turn on a dime — it’s really a challenge for enforcement to be able to make that happen. And we’re going to have some problems,” he said.

“There’s going to be inconsistencies in the field, in enforcement for a period of time, and that period of time, we don’t know what that’s going to be. I think, hopefully, this is not a long period of time. But there will be issues on how we deal with this over the course of the next several months,” Keppler added.

In Congress, Collins led the effort to include the restart suspension. A bipartisan group of lawmakers supported her efforts, arguing that the rule was pushing truckers to drive during congested daytime hours, increasing the risk of accidents.

“We have known since the beginning that the federal government did not properly evaluate the potential impacts of the changes it made in July 2013,” ATA President Bill Graves said.

Opponents, such as Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Cory Booker of New Jersey, claimed the new rule reduced driver fatigue. Blumenthal pledged to press ahead next year with undoing the suspension. The Democratic senators found support from several groups and the Obama administration.

Henry Jasny, general counsel for the Advocates for Auto and Highway Safety, opposed the measure: “We think [the restart] is one of the few things the agency did to rein in and make safer the open-ended use of the restart. We thought it was reasonable, but we didn’t think it went far enough.”

Former FMCSA Administrator Annette Sandberg told TT the law will be a “good opportunity for everybody to step back, and hopefully we can collect some good data . . . let the data direct the policy, rather than make policy with some very limited data.”

Last week, suppliers of electronic logging devices said they were already working on software updates that will enable their fleet customers to take advantage of the change.

PeopleNet is finalizing the testing for its update and plans to deploy it to all of its customers by Jan. 1, said Elise Chianelli, the company’s senior product manager for safety and compliance.

Tom Cuthbertson, vice president of regulatory compliance at Omnitracs, said it will be easier to revert to the old restart rule than it would be to prepare for new regulation.

However, “we still have to go through testing, we still have to make modifications, and we still have to make sure it’s accurate for the customers to maintain compliance.”

Cuthbertson, who joined Omnitracs when the company acquired XRS Corp., estimated the software update will be available within 45 days.

PeopleNet’s Chianelli said it is “a little frustrating” that the restart change was effective immediately.

As a result, early adopters of ELDs will need to wait on an update from their suppliers, while companies still using paper logs can “flip the switch” right away, she said.

“They really haven’t taken technology into consideration,” Chianelli said.

At the same time, carriers also will have to update their other systems, such as fuel optimization and routing, to account for the change, she added.

“We plan for and build flexibility into our technology solutions, for exactly these kinds of situations,” said Randy Thome, vice president of technology services at J.J. Keller & Associates. “So, for us, the process is not complicated to revert back to the old restart rule, even temporarily.”

Rand McNally estimates it will release an update for its ELD products in about 30 days, said Amy Krouse, Rand McNally’s director of public relations.

“At first blush, this appears to be a simple software update,” she said, but the transition “needs to be managed and tested carefully,” given the requirement that carriers keep a six-month log history as well as seven or eight days’ worth of logs in their cabs.