Editorial: Stop the Juggernaut

Congress needs to prevent the Department of Transportation from rushing out the door with a half-baked hours-of-service rule that would have a devastating impact on trucking. And the best way for Congress to do that is to embrace the Senate’s ban on using any of the money in the new DOT budget from being spent on finalizing the rule.

	More HOS Coverage
	Pressure Mounts to Pass Hours Ban (July 3) TCA Seeks Support to Fight Hours Proposal (July 3) Hart: No Hours Rule This Year (June 26) Kansas City Hours Hearing Draws 200-Plus Truckers (June 26) How to Submit Comments on the Hours Proposal
	Shop Online
	Hours of Service Information Pack Hours of Service Exemption Survey

DOT officials state they are unlikely to finish work on the new rule before the Clinton administration leaves office on Jan. 20, but all the while they continue their furious efforts to push a cobbled-together rule onto the industry.

Clyde J. Hart Jr., who is running the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration these days, wants trucking to let the department finalize its rule and then fight in Congress or the courts if it doesn’t like the plan. This is an unrealistic request. History has shown how much harder it is to overturn a rule once it’s on the books than it is to stop the agency from issuing the rule in the first place.

The Senate unanimously adopted the freeze on funding to halt the regulatory process in its tracks. We call on the House-Senate conferees to adopt that language and send a clear message to DOT that it must formulate the rule so that it works without hamstringing the industry it is intended to help.

If DOT is serious about modifying its proposal and making it palatable to trucking and the other interested parties, it needs to take the time to study the comments that are still flooding in. Hart told Congress recently that his agency is receiving a thousand responses a day.

It took DOT nearly three years to develop the detailed proposal, and that was after the agency had already received 1,650 written comments and held six public hearings — just to lay the groundwork. Since the proposal was published in April, seven more hearings have been held, with standing-room-only crowds, and thousands more comments filed. The nearly all-negative reaction shows that a lot more work needs to be done.

Everyone seems to agree that driver hours of service need to be updated, but until a better plan can be devised, we’re better off with what we’ve had for the past 63 years.

And since DOT is struggling to fill the bill on its own, we think Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater and the leaders at the FMCSA should reconsider the value of a negotiated rulemaking, in which they would sit down with the best minds of the trucking and bus industries to mutually craft a set of rules that will work.