An HOS Rule That Works
This Editorial appears in the July 5 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
The proposal for revamping the federal government’s hours-of-service rule for truck drivers that a coalition of interest groups released recently illustrates just how little these political theorists understand about highway safety and the business of moving America’s freight.
These groups — which have created numerous obstacles to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s drive to rewrite the archaic rules governing commercial drivers — now have revealed to the world their view of trucking, and it’s a very telling proposal.
The groups, which rally around Public Citizen, have urged FMCSA to adopt a new HOS rule that would limit trucking workers to eight hours a day of driving time (compared with the current maximum limit of 11) and to cut the maximum allowed workday for drivers to 12 hours from the existing 14.
These interest groups made their recommendations with no regard for the tremendous costs that would be added to the nation’s transportation bill and, eventually, to the cost of all goods purchased by Americans; or to the effects of their proposal on overall highway congestion and the negative effects of that congestion on safety; or on how the movement of goods would be delayed by such a rule, creating major disruptions to what has become a just-in-time economy.
Meanwhile, these interest groups also ignore the laudable safety record that the trucking industry has had under the HOS rule that FMCSA wrote and that the groups are trying to overturn.
Under the current HOS rule, 2008 was the safest year in history since the Department of Transportation began compiling the data in 1975. The 2008 data are the latest available.
During 2008, both the number and the rate of fatalities involving trucks declined from the previous year. The data show that for every 100 million miles traveled, there were 1.86 fatalities in truck-involved road crashes.
While we are far from satisfied with even that exemplary performance, the data show that the HOS rule FMCSA formulated works and helps to make our highways safer, just as intended by its authors.
Unfortunately, the agency and the nation’s trucking industry continue to have to deal with the unproductive efforts by these interest groups, which seem far less interested in improving highway safety and much more interested in undermining the nation’s freight delivery system, which is the best and most efficient — and we believe the safest — in the world.
Let us hope that FMCSA and the Department of Transportation have the courage of their convictions and stand by their HOS rule.
