NTSB’s Hersman Urges EOBRs For All Commercial Trucks
This story appears in the Nov. 23 print edition of Transport Topics.
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top transportation safety investigator said all commercial trucks should be outfitted with electronic onboard recorders to monitor driver hours.
Speaking at the National Press Club here Nov. 16, Debbie Hersman, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the use of EOBRs would help monitor fatigue, which contributes to many truck-involved accidents.
“At this point, the safety board continues to see fatigue in truck and bus accidents,” Hersman told Transport Topics after her speech. “One thing that we feel very strongly about is that they ought to have electronic onboard recorders in all trucks.”
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration proposed a rule in 2007 to require some carriers, but not all, to use the equipment. Hersman called that proposal “de minimus” — minimal.
The rule, she said, “would really only get to a small fraction of the industry, and those people would be chronic violators — people who had two successive compliance reviews that were poor.
“We think that if you want to raise the standard for the industry and level the playing field for all drivers, that you’ve got to have an honest way of accounting the hours that people are working,” Hersman said. “We investigate accidents on a regular basis where we find two sets of logbooks.”
Hersman also weighed in on FMCSA’s ongoing review and possible revision of the hours-of-service rule for truck drivers, telling TT, “The safety board believes that hours-of-service revisions need to be based on scientific principles and what we’ve learned in our years of research.”
During her remarks, she said fatigue is “multifaceted” and a difficult challenge to address.
“Fatigue is actually one of the most insidious issues in the transportation industry. Transportation is a 24/7 operation and fatigue has been on our most-wanted list of transportation safety improvements,” Hersman said.
When the NTSB studies an accident, Hersman said, the board’s investigators set up a “72-hour history for the operators who were involved to try to determine if they were fatigued.”
“Unfortunately, we find fatigue in more accidents than you would think,” she said. “I think the very nature of the work that people do, the schedules that they work in some industries, the unpredictability of the schedule, the lack of addressing issues like sleep apnea or other medical conditions and not having good procedures to allow people to call in fatigued in a nonpunitive way.”
NTSB has no regulatory authority, so Hersman said the board relies on agencies adopting its safety recommendations.
“By and large, they agree with our recommended actions, but they may be constrained to implement them because they must consider factors other than safety in their decision-making process,” she said, noting that some changes “require societal and budgetary choices.”
Hersman was sworn in as chairwoman of the NTSB in July, but she has been a member of the board since 2004.
