Trucking, Retailers Again Ask FMCSA to Withdraw Latest HOS Proposal

This story appears in the March 14 print edition of Transport Topics.

Trade organizations representing motor carriers, shippers, and retailers continued their campaign against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s proposed hours-of-service rule change, making last-minute appeals last week that the agency withdraw the rule and claiming it would hurt supply chain productivity and highway safety.

The FMCSA’s website received more than 21,000 written comments on its proposed hours rule during the agency’s public comment period, which ended March 4.

The comments ranged from one- or two-sentence statements from truck drivers to multipage arguments fashioned by corporate lawyers.

In its Dec. 23 HOS proposal, FMCSA said it was leaning toward cutting driving hours back to 10 from 11 and modifying the 34-hour reset provision by requiring that it include two rest periods of at least six hours and mandating that they fall between midnight and 6 a.m..

In addition to the written comments, agency officials got an earful of testimony, mostly opposing the change, from truckers during a daylong hearing in Arlington, Va., last month.

The current FMCSA hours rule, years in the making, was challenged successfully in federal court. The agency is under a court order to issue a final revised rule in July.

One of the comment letters filed with FMCSA on March 4 was signed by 50 members of the Trucking Association Executives Council. The TAEC, which includes staff executives of state trucking associations and conferences affiliated with American Trucking Associations, asked the agency to retain the current hours rule.

“These existing rules have contributed to record levels of safety performance by the trucking industry, while not disrupting the industry’s critically important job of efficiently moving America’s freight,” the TAEC wrote in the letter. “The proposed rules would harm trucking’s productivity and, worse, would likely reverse our industry’s hard-earned safety improvement trend.”

ATA, which previously had asked for a four-day extension of the comment period, filed a 31-page statement just before the deadline.

ATA said the proposed changes would “have virtually no benefit in terms of reducing fatigue-related truck crashes and, in fact, will create other types of truck-safety concerns, such as promoting aggressive driving and driving during peak hours of congestion.”

“In this current hours-of-service proposal, the agency has abandoned years of objective analysis in favor speculation and internal ‘judgments’ of critical areas,” ATA wrote.

Those comments were in sharp contrast to a 23-page statement filed jointly by the Teamsters union, Public Citizen, the Truck Safety Coalition and the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, which said the proposed rule would “correct safety deficiencies in the current hours-of-service rule.”

The groups said they generally support the changed rule.

“However, [our] support for the proposal is contingent on the restoration of the 10-hour limit on the number of consecutive hours of driving permitted in each work shift, the same limit that had been in place for 65 years from 1938 until 2004,” the groups said in their letter.

The groups had problems with the 34-hour restart, recommending that the once-a-week-only use of the 34-hour restart should apply equally to drivers on a 70-hour, eight-day schedule as well as to drivers on a 60-hour, seven-day schedule.

However, the National Industrial Transportation League, representing major shippers, said the changes in driving hours would require shippers to substantially rework freight distribution operations at a significant cost in order to meet delivery schedules.

It also would require more drivers and equipment to meet existing freight demands and force carriers to operate more frequently during daytime hours when highways experience the greatest congestion, NITL said.

“The rule would remove flexibility for motor carriers and shippers and impose unnecessary and costly measures on operators of commercial motor vehicles, based on alleged safety benefits that are not well-founded in science or otherwise clearly documented in the proposed rule,” NITL wrote in its March 4 comments.

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance said the proposed rule would have the unintended consequence of making roadside enforcement more complex for enforcement officers and could “open the door toward more drivers falsifying their records.”

“The consensus from our state and jurisdictional enforcement members regarding these proposed rules is that they are confusing and not easily understood,” CVSA said.

The National Tank Truck Carriers said the real victims of the significant changes to the hours rule are the truck drivers “who will see their ability to earn a good living threatened and their work and personal lives again altered because of changing political winds in Washington, D.C.”

“We are here again not because the agency or the industry have identified a serious safety problem with the current hours-of-service, but rather because of the political power of a cabal of anti-truck activists and their friends on key U.S. Senate committees,” NTTC said.

The National Retail Federation said the proposed changes would increase transportation costs by 3% to 20% and would adversely affect the U.S. economy.

“NRF is particularly concerned about the requirement for nighttime rest periods because retailers use overnight deliveries extensively in order to avoid daytime road congestion, particularly in urban areas,” the federation said.