DESPITE ample evidence that the current truck driver hours of service (HOS) regulations have improved highway safety, the Obama administration announced plans to do a complete rewrite of the rules. The October 27 announcement brought a strong response from the trucking industry.
Officials from the American Trucking Associations (ATA) repeated what they have been saying for the past five years: The hours-of-service regulations as currently constructed are good safety rules. They are working, and the proof is in the industry's safety performance since they took effect in 2004.
“Safety in the trucking industry has greatly improved while operating under the current hours-of-service rules, Bill Graves, ATA president and chief executive officer. “Over the past five years we saw a strong decline in truck-involved crashes on our nation's highways.”
Figures from the Department of Transportation (DOT) demonstrate that the trucking industry is now the safest it has been since DOT began keeping crash statistics in 1975. The number of truck-involved fatalities on US highways has decreased 19% since the current HOS rules took effect. The number of injuries fell 13% since 2004. These improvements came at a time when the number of registered large trucks operating on US highways increased by hundreds of thousands, the number of miles driven by large trucks rose by more than two billion miles.
That data did not stop the Obama Administration from caving in on a lawsuit assault waged by anti-trucking groups, including Public Citizen, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, The Truck Safety Coalition, and the Teamsters. The administration agreed to restart the HOS rulemaking process from scratch. The anti-trucking groups have attacked the 11-hour driving and 34-hour restart provisions that make up the core of the HOS rules.
DOT's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) will issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking within nine months and a final rule in less than two years. It's not absolutely clear what will be in that new rule, but the best guess is that it probably would drop the driving limit to 10 hours and change the reset provisions. Electronic driver logs may be mandated.
Reducing driving hours and changing the reset provisions could cut driver productivity by 3% to 6%, which will increase transportation costs across the entire US economy, according to some transportation experts. Ultimately, the higher operating costs would be passed along to consumers.
Change may be coming over the next two years, but it won't happen overnight. The current HOS rules are still very much in effect and will remain in effect until replaced by new rules, according to John Conley, president of National Tank Truck Carriers Inc. Nothing will change for truck fleets or their drivers in the short term.