No clear 'net benefit' to overnight restart, FMCSA concedes

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Fleet Owner  /  March 6, 2017

Inspector General signs off on review of 2013 hours of service changes

The Congressionally mandated review of 2013 changes to truck driver hours of service requirements has turned up no evidence that the restart provisions are, overall, beneficial. The tip comes from none other than the Department of Transportation’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

In a letter to new Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and key committee members in Congress, OIG signs off on the yet-to-be-released final report by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), saying the agency followed the review requirements imposed when lawmakers suspended provisions that included requiring consecutive nighttime off-duty periods (1 a.m. to 5 a.m.) to reset a driver’s weekly work limits. Those limits were not to be enforced pending a study that demonstrated the plan was effective in reducing fatigue-related accidents. Many in the trucking industry had lobbied successfully that the 2013 requirement disrupted the work schedules—and rest routines—of nightshift truckers and put more trucks on the highway during morning rush-hour periods.

“We concur with the Department’s conclusion that the study did not explicitly identify a net benefit from the use of the two suspended provisions of the restart rule on driver operations, safety, fatigue, and health,” the OIG letter states.

Language in the current DOT budget extension calls for the suspension to be made permanent with such a determination.

A DOT spokesman told Fleet Owner the agency is "currently in the final stages of review" before sending the full report, delivered to OIG on Jan. 5, to Congress.

American Trucking Associations President and CEO Chris Spear said the trucking industry was pleased with the validation of its position that the restart did not perform as advertised.

“We knew from the beginning that these Obama administration restrictions provided no benefit to safety,” Spear said, “and in light of the DOT’s findings—corroborated by the DOT Inspector General—it is good for our industry and for the motoring public that they will be done away with permanently.”

ATA has fought against these restrictions—which limited drivers’ flexibility in the use of the restart—since they were first proposed in 2013, the association notes.

“Congress repeatedly told the FMCSA that rules of this nature must show a benefit to safety and this report clearly shows there was no benefit,” Spear said. “This marks the end of a long struggle, but hopefully the beginning of a new era of inclusive and data-based regulation.”

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association likewise agreed with the finding that there is no safety benefit in the currently suspended provisions. 

“It’s not only common sense, it’s trucker sense,” said OOIDA Executive Vice President Todd Spencer. “We have always championed the need for flexibility in the hours-of-service regulations so that drivers can drive when rested and avoid times of heavy congestion or bad weather conditions.”

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34-hour restart study affirms less restrictive hours of service, buries 2013 regs

Overdrive  /  March 6, 2017

The results of a new study confirm that truckers’ 34-hour restarts will not require two 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods and will not be limited to once per week.

The study has not yet been made public, but a letter issued by the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General confirms the report’s conclusions. To comply with an order from Congress, the study’s results dictate the removal of the 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. provision and the removal of the once-weekly limit.

Congress suspended the 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. requirement and the once-weekly limit in December 2014, pending the issuance of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s study. The long-awaited report from the Department of Transportation shows those provisions did nothing to enhance safety, according to an OIG update issued last week.

The DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will likely need to issue a formal notice to permanently remove the rules, but the regs have been suspended since a December 2014-issued notice. The report does not change the rules truckers’ currently operate under.

The DOT’s OIG on Thursday sent a letter to Congress signing off the DOT study, saying it agreed with the report’s conclusions and that the DOT followed Congress’ directives in completing the research. The study itself has not yet been made public by FMCSA.

The study found that truckers abiding by the July 1, 2013, regulations — those requiring the early morning periods to be included in the restart — operated no more safely than truckers not abiding by the rules.

More than 200 drivers were studied for the DOT’s report, which was executed by FMCSA and Virginia Tech. The drivers were divided into two groups. One group followed the more restrictive 2013 rules and the others were free to use the restart as they wanted.

The study “did not explicitly identify a net benefit from the use of the two suspended provisions of the restart rule on driver operations, safety, fatigue and health.”

Researchers compared drivers’ schedules and analyzed events like crashes and near crashes, as well as driver alertness and health.

The more restrictive hours of service rules took effect in July 2013, prompting widespread criticism by both fleets and drivers for preventing truckers from returning to duty until 5 a.m. after a restart, even if the restart had spanned a full 34 hours.

Chief arguments against the regulations were that it pushed drivers into early morning rush hour traffic — which caused safety and operational concerns — and that FMCSA issued the rule with little scientific evidence to back up the restrictions.

Congress cleared legislation in December 2014 to halt the regulations and require FMCSA to perform the 34-hour restart study. Congress set the bar high for the 2013 rules to go back into effect, requiring the study to show exceeding safety and health benefits for drivers’ operating under the 2013 rules.

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No 'Net Benefit' Found in Controversial 34-Hour Restart Provisions

Heavy Duty Trucking  /  March 6, 2017

A DOT study apparently has failed to “explicitly identify a net benefit” from two suspended provisions of the hours of service rules regarding the 34-hour restart.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued hours-of-service regulations in 2013 that featured two controversial restart provisions. They required that the 34-hour restart include two 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods, even if the 34 hours had already been reached. It also limited use of the restart provision to once every 168 hours. The trucking industry raised concerns about the rule’s unintended consequences, such as increased congestion during daytime traffic hours.

In late 2014, as part of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2015, Congress suspended those two provisions and directed FMCSA to conduct a study of the operational, safety, health, and fatigue impacts of these rules.

Although the data collection for that study was completed in 2015, the study has not yet been made public. But a DOT spokesperson told HDT on March 6 that "we are currently in the final stages of review before transmitting the report to Congress."

The law also mandated that the DOT's Office of Inspector General review the study. Last week, in a letter to Congress, the OIG wrote that it “found that DOT’s study met the act’s requirements. We also concur with the Department’s conclusion that the study did not explicitly identify a net benefit from the use of the two suspended provisions on driver operations, safety, fatigue, and health.”

Drivers from a variety of fleet sizes and operations provided a substantial amount of data during the study period, according to FMCSA. More than 220 drivers contributed data as they drove their normal routes. The data included over 3,000 driver duty cycles captured by electronic logging devices, over 75,000 driver alertness tests, and more than 22,000 days of driver sleep data.

American Trucking Associations President and CEO Chris Spear said the trucking industry was pleased by the news.

"The release of this report closes what has been a long, and unnecessary, chapter in our industry's drive to improve highway safety," Spear said. "We knew from the beginning that these Obama administration restrictions provided no benefit to safety, and in light of the DOT's findings – corroborated by the DOT Inspector General – it is good for our industry and for the motoring public that they will be done away with permanently as specified by language ATA lead the charge on including in the most recently passed Continuing Resolution."

ATA has fought against these restrictions – which limited drivers' flexibility in the use of the restart – since they were first proposed in 2013.

"Congress repeatedly told the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that rules of this nature must show a benefit to safety and this report clearly shows there was no benefit," Spear said. "This marks the end of a long struggle, but hopefully the beginning of a new era of inclusive and data-based regulation."

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association also was quick to respond to the news. “It’s not only common sense, it’s trucker sense,” said OOIDA executive vice president, Todd Spencer, in a statement. “We have always championed the need for flexibility in the hours-of-service regulations so that drivers can drive when rested and avoid times of heavy congestion or bad weather conditions.”

Lane Kidd, managing director of the Alliance for Driver Safety & Security, told HDT that “the results of the restart study were no surprise, since the Congress set the bar very high that the federal agency had to meet to justify the net safety benefits of the new rule.”

“The OIG’s assessment of the restart study supports what the industry has been saying all along, that requiring two consecutive periods of 1-5 a.m. and limiting the restart to once a week didn't contain any net benefit to the industry,” David Heller, the Truckload Carriers Association’s vice president of government affairs told HDT.

He added that TCA “looks forward to working with the Trump administration on promulgating future rules regarding truck drivers hours of service that make sense for the whole industry.”

Joe Rajkovacz, director of governmental affairs and communications for the Western States Trucking Association, told HDT that the group also was "not really surprised by the finding and don’t think many others are in trucking, either.

"The whole issue of the 34-hour restart provision had been politicized in our opinion," he added, "and it's nice to see a government agency actually use science appropriately to arrive at the correct result-– it's just too bad they sat on the findings for so long."