House committee has watchful eye on HOS rule

House committee has watchful eye on HOS rule    Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are concerned about a proposal to limit the work day of drivers and other regulations from the Obama administration aimed at the trucking industry, and plan to review how those rules are being implemented, a top aide said Tuesday.
   Committee members worry about the impact of the rules on motor carriers as the industry finally begins to recover from a severe, three-year downturn, Jennifer Hall, Republican counsel to the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, said Tuesday at the National Industrial Transportation League's spring policy forum, in Arlington, Va.
   The main area of concern involves proposed hours-of-service rules for drivers. But the administration has also moved ahead with the Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) rating system for carriers and mandated that trucks be outfitted with electronic logging devices that record all mechanical operations of a vehicle.
   There also could be more competition from Mexican trucking companies, she said, as the administration pushes to open the Southwest border and comply with its free trade agreement with Mexico, although most industry officials don't expect many long-haul carriers to cross into the United States.
   The combination of regulatory changes could put a lot of pressure on truckers' resources, Hall said.
   The Department of Transportation last summer proposed that driver time behind the wheel be reduced an hour to 10 hours per day. The draft rulemaking also would add 12 to 16 hours to the restart period before the driver can start the clock on weekly driving time, mandate new rest breaks and institute a hard stop to the workday limit.
   The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is expected to issue a final rule by late July.
   The Office of Management and Budget determinedthe rule would cause a 2.78 percent drop in motor carrier productivity, but the motor carrier industry said its best guess is that the productivity impact will be about 7 percent.
   'We think there's a huge potential cost to this industry in the neighborhood of $2 billion to $2.5 billion' per year, said David Osiecki, the American Trucking Associations' senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs, during a separate panel discussion.
   Trucking industry officials argue the 2003 change in the rules for preventing driver fatigue have succeeded as fatalities from truck crashes continue to decline even as traffic on the roads increases. The DOT agreed in 2008 to revisit the rule to settle a lawsuit from the Teamsters union and consumer safety groups, arguing the rulemaking didn't take into account the impact on the driver's health.
   The subcommittee is not convinced about the justifications for the proposed changes to hours-of-service rules and has questions about whether the administration's cost-benefit analysis was done properly, Hall said. The subcommittee will closely watch how the administration responds to industry comments, she added.
   Osiecki said the ATA is likely to file litigation against the final rule if it doesn't like the outcome, which would push out any potential effective date into the future.
   The move to a new rule 'seems to be driven more by politics than factual data,' he said.
      The CSA program is designed to help the government better oversee the motor carrier industry through improved sharing of violation data among state, local and federal agencies. A carrier's overall safety scores are now publicly available and are being studied by customers to make business decisions.
   Carriers have to hire extra personnel to review the data on file in their account to make sure it is accurate and make necessary corrections, but the extra cost eventually will be offset by a leveling of the playing field as 'marginal actors' who try to skirt the law are forced out of business, Osiecki said.
   The FMCSA isn't directly targeting enforcement at drivers, but carriers may weed out bad drivers on their own because the driver's scores attach to the carrier's record.
   The trucking industry, which at one point vigorously opposed requirements to install electronic onboard recorders on vehicles, now sees their benefit, Osiecki said. Studies have shown, contrary to warnings from some quarters, that only about 4 percent of the driver force fudges its driving logs and could be impact by automated monitoring of their activity, he said.
   Big fleets have already adopted electronic logging devices and learned they can help them operate more efficiently 'because they have a better handle on where their drivers are and how many hours they have available, so they can dispatch them more effectively. And there is a whole lot of other data these systems capture from an engine and safety standpoint so they can better manage' their assets, he said.
   'So the concern about reduced productivity,' he added, 'may be overblown a bit.'
   The combined effect of the hours-of-service rule and CSA could reduce driver capacity by 1 percent to 3 percent, Osiecki said.
   Read more about the impact of CSA and other regulations on trucking in the April issue of American Shipper. ' Eric Kulisch