If at First You Don’t Succeed…

There is something to be said for tenacity, and then there is just plain old stubbornness.

The Hours of Service (HOS) Rule is back on the argument table. You remember that one, it’s there were four key changes to the rule: changed the legal driving hours from 10 to 11 hours, reduced the drivers work day from 15 hours to 14 hours, allowed a driver to reset the “week” by taking 34 hours of “off duty” time and the biggest change removing the ability of a driver to “stop the clock” and mark himself off-duty for a chunk of time in the middle of his workday.

The “Stop the clock” change had the biggest impact on the way that the truckers operated, perhaps removed the driver fatigue issue from the table and impacted driver pay in a remarkable way.

If you have been in this industry long enough to go back to a 2003 should remember all the debates surrounding the rule changes. There was a great deal of testing and research behind the recommendations to change the rules, testing that was supported by Wal-Mart and its huge private fleet. Wal-Mart, as a shipper and a trucker support the rules changes, admitting that there would be an economic impact to the changes but that the projected safety impacts were worth the economic costs.

If you were in the industry before 2003, then you should remember the old HOS rules. The loopholes available for drivers to be able to gain the old HOS rules were large enough that you could park several tractor-trailers in them.  The most “misused” part of the old rules was the use of “off duty”. If the driver needs to spend too much time picking up a load he could go off duty. Well you can imagine that most drivers would be conscientious, there were drivers that would use the off duty for any time that they were having to wait so that when you would look at their log book the “on duty - off duty” line would look like a heartbeat. In essence the drivers were team in the logbook and the rules to be able to give them more time in their on duty day to be able to get their 10 hours of driving time.

The 2003 HOS rules change that. The new rule set that once you went off duty you had to stay off duty for a minimum of 10 hours; In the industry called “restarting the clock”.  That one rule change hugely impacted the way that the trucking companies operated AND the way that shippers operated. Trucking companies started telling AND enforcing shippers a maximum of two hours of free time for pickup and delivery before a driver detention charge would occur.  Shippers on both the delivery and pickup side started to use Yard Management Systems (YMS) and scheduling appointment systems to avoid having to pay a driver detention charge.  The industry as a whole made adjustments to the way that it operated to address the cost impact of this single safety rule change.

While carriers and shippers were not happy with the rule change when it was proposed in 2002, they understood the need for the change and embraced having to make the change. Carriers and enlightened shippers invested in new technology to support the change.  

The industry adjusted to the new rules and motored on.

But back in the background there’ve been multiple attempts by different public safety interest groups outside of our industry that want to send the roll back to the old 1934 standard. The arguments have been purposely blind to the amount of effort and work that went into the rule change recommendations, to the effort of the industry to make the changes, and the cost that industry has absorbed to support the changes. In fact, if you look at the web sites for the different members of the dissenting organizations, they paint the trucking industry as greedy and unsafe.    

It’s the same old coalition; the leader is a group called Public Citizen, followed by the Teamsters, Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH), Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and Parents Against Tired Truckers.   

While the purported goals of this coalition of nonprofit groups (not sure if you could really call the Teamsters nonprofit) are to be saluted, their collective inability to accept data that disproves their arguments, or their inability to accept a not perfect rule is not an example of tenacity but is an example of just plain being stubborn. 

Twice now public Citizen has successfully sued to have the regulations overturned mainly based on the argument that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) failed to properly consider the effect of the regulations on driver health. What is really amazing is that a great deal of driver health research was conducted prior to making the rule change. A key driver to the decision of the mandatory clock restart for one of driver went "off duty" was based off of scientific sleep research study. The argument that the FMCSA did not do sufficient research into driver health is a bogus argument.

And I am not the only one saying that the argument is bogus. American Trucking Association (ATA) spokesman Clayton Boyce also identified Public Citizen’s arguments as bogus when the ATA filed a motion to intercede on March 12.  

Quoting Mr. Boyce, "These groups continue to mislead the public and others, including Congress, about the nature of the hours of service regulation. They are claiming that 34-hour restart allows ridiculous amounts of driving and on duty time, and this is bogus. They continually push this one extra hour of driving, never telling anyone that to get that extra hour of driving the driver had to shorten his workday by at least one, possibly two hours, and increased the required rest time by at least two hours. So on balance the drivers are much better rested."

There is an expectation by the consortium of public safety groups that the new administration will lend a sympathetic ear to their blind and not a wholly honest argument. One hopes that in this onslaught of higher levels of regulation by the federal government upon business that if you call her heads will prevail and put this argument to rest once and for all.

I’m just not holding my breath.