Letters to the Editor: HOS, Roundabouts, Infrastructure Panel
These letters appear in the Jan. 28 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Hours of Service
If there ever was a segment of the transportation industry that needed an overhaul, it’s trucking.
The only positive thing that came out of the hours-of-service change was the 34-hour restart. However, the 11-hour rule doesn’t change driver fatigue. Let’s say a driver sits at a shipping/receiving facility for four hours and then is immediately dispatched to pick up another load and sits for another two to four hours to get reloaded.
Then he is expected to drive another 11 hours to stay on schedule and make a decent paycheck. If the truck isn’t moving, there’s no money. During this time, the driver needs to shower, eat and scale his load to make sure it is legal.
Drivers are still being creative with their logbooks; they have to, or else the bills don’t get paid at home.
Let’s face it — trucking companies pay a driver just enough to keep him from working at the local factory.
There is a longtime unspoken rule in trucking — never refuse a load, even if you can’t legally make it. It may be unspoken, but it is heavily enforced by a lot of companies, even those that claim to comply with the law.
Believe me, this unspoken rule is being enforced even in the biggest, most compliant companies because the chief executive officer cannot be in every conversation between the driver and the dispatcher/load planner.
How many hours does a driver have to be awake and on duty to make a living? Seventy hours a week? That’s nothing. Do you think a smart driver is going to log all the hours he sits around waiting at the scale, eating, etc.?
Not that the drivers really want to work 70 to 80 hours a week. We know it’s dangerous. But what are you going to do? Quit? At 37 years old, with almost 2 million miles of experience, who is going to retrain me for a new career that will bring enough to pay the bills at home? The driver is in a real pickle here, and the companies know it. That is why a “good” dispatcher is going to push the limits with drivers.
I am not disgruntled. I love this industry, but it needs a serious overhaul. Putting a black box in a truck is not going to solve the problem. It is going to cause drivers to quit in larger numbers than they already are.
Alarik Wood
Owner-Operator
Texas
This is in response to the letter in your Jan. 14 issue (p. 8), in which the writer said he was “becoming tired of the continued drama from the hours-of-service debacle.”
The writer also questioned the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s reissuing of the same rule. One needs, in a manner of speaking, to read between the lines as to what the court ruling did not say.
The court only vacated the 11-hour driving and 34-hour restart rules but offered no alternatives. The decision didn’t say to go back to the 10 hours of driving, nor did it extend the restart period.
Simply stated, the court set a December deadline, past which the 11-hour and 34-hour rules could not be used, and unless some new rule was in place, drivers would have had no limit on the driving hours. They could have driven all of the 14 hours permitted in a tour of duty.
FMCSA was not prepared to issue a new final rule before the December deadline, so they issued an interim rule that maintained the status quo — and maintaining the status quo in this case was critical. This, for the time being, keeps a cap on the driving hours.
As for the 34-hour restart, it has always been optional. Motor carriers and drivers may choose and can log hours as they always have and with good time management, drive every day without having to use any restart.
One needs more than a cursory understanding of the regulations and must fully examine all the pertinent documents to see that this interim rule was a safeguard until a new final rule could be determined.
Ron Edwards
Lansing, Mich.
Roundabouts
About the article with the headline “Safer Roundabouts Are Used to Replace Intersections in New York” (1-14, p. 7): You know the only people the so-called traffic experts ever consider are those whose vehicles have only two or three axles.
They are certainly right — the smaller lines do force people to slow down. Heck, it forces trucks to have to stop and move all the way up on the curb as they enter one and even then drag their rear axle on a spread axle trailer up on the sidewalk or curb. This is certainly safer than an intersection.
The experts need to ride in a truck with a spread axle for three days — and then go back to the drawing board.
It really does not surprise me that New York is going to get them.
Frank Williams
Driver
Joe Tex Xpress
Mt. Vernon, Texas
Infrastructure Panel
Re: “Panel to Back Fuel Tax Hike” (1-14, p. 1). Current oil consumption in the United States is 20.6 million barrels per day, of which 12.4 million barrels are imported.
An alternate plan for the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission could be to place a $5 per barrel surcharge on imported oil. That would bring in $62 million per day or $22,630 billion per year.
That earmarked money could rebuild our roads and bridges and spread the cost over many users other than trucks and cars. In addition, it offers more protection to domestic exploration companies to find oil and compete. That could reduce imports as well.
Reduced import demand from OPEC could lower the price per barrel. With a pricing elasticity of $50 to $100 per barrel, what small difference could $5 per barrel make?
Hans Rohl
Tax Consultant
Klein & Barenblat
San Antonio
This is a much-needed multiyear plan. However, the tax funds generated must be kept in a fund exclusively for what it is intended — infrastructure repairs and replacement only.
Keep in mind what happened to the Social Security funds. I’m not sure Transportation Secretary Mary Peters can pull this off — good luck.
David Litchfield
Account Executive
Management and Marketing Services
Royal Oak, Mich.
