Editorial: Do It Right

There’s an old adage that goes: “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”

While the Earl of Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, to whom the adage is attributed, is unlikely to have had trucking and its work rules in mind when he uttered those words in 1746, his sentiments remain just as relevant today.

About the only thing that all sides of the debate over hours-of-service rules agree upon is the need to change the work rules, which haven’t had a major revision since they were written. That was when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the White House.

After seeing the Department of Transportation’s latest, and long overdue, crack at fixing the 61-year old rules last week, Lord Chesterfield’s words came to the fore.

Two previous attempts to revise the rules went down in flames after federal regulators were unable to craft proposals that could win the support of enough of the participants to allow a consensus to form. Based on the initial reaction to the latest proposal, it appears likely that the current effort will suffer a similar fate.

Everyone — trucking, the driving public, Congress, safety advocacy groups and governmental regulators — say they want safer highways. So why is it so hard to find a compromise?

However well-intentioned the DOT proposal may be, the new rules will severely exacerbate the growing driver shortage and increase the number of trucks it will take to deliver the flood of goods created by the nation’s booming economy.

The “new economy” that has been fired by computer and Internet technology may well be jeopardized by the plan, because goods wouldn’t be moved quickly enough to meet demand, and because there wouldn’t be enough trucks and drivers to deliver the products.

Also, the additional traffic the sweeping revisions would generate by restricting the number of hours drivers can work and by mandating more off-duty time would surely reduce any safety gains that might otherwise be expected [See pages 1 and 6 to 10].

A balance must be struck between the needs of the economy and the need for improved highway safety. The latest proposal falls far short of the mark. We can only hope it doesn’t take another five years to reach an agreement on a reasonable rewriting of trucking’s hours-of-service rules.