Editorial: A Scorecard Would Be Handy
urrounded by a swirl of legal petitions and lawsuits, the driver hours-of-service regulation would seem to be turning into a full employment act for lawyers.
One might wish for a scorecard to keep track of all the interest groups, their specific demands and their alliances in the clamor for more changes to rules that already have been broadly revamped and then altered again in the span of two years.
The regulators, in the meantime, have told us they are prepared to “vigorously” defend their August 2005 rule, the version now in effect.
Then there are the groups that would heap more mandates on the industry, all the while declaiming that trucking is still unsafe and suggesting that if the government does not cinch the rules tighter, it will have blood on its hands.
In this second category, Joan Claybrook of Public Citizen, the current incarnation of the old railroad-funded CRASH, along with the well-meaning Parents Against Tired Truckers, have again cloaked their demands, which include computerized driver logs, as serving the health of truckers.
If Claybrook has ever acknowledged trucking’s greatly improved safety record, as reflected in federal crash statistics, we can’t recall hearing the compliment. Whether as a professional activist or as a regulator — in the ’70s she rode herd on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s ill-fated 121 antilock brake rule, which became the poster child for the wrong way to regulate an industry — Claybrook has treated trucking as a pariah.
We think everyone can comfortably set aside driver health issues, so far as hours of service are concerned, and proceed directly to resolving the operational issues.
American Trucking Associations has asked the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to address a conflict between total hours of rest and the realities of two-driver sleeper teams. The rules allow a driver to accumulate 10 hours of rest by combining an 8-hour and a 2-hour period, but the practical matter in team driving is five hours on and five hours off. The consequences of altering that practice would be profound.
Here, reality and regulation need to be brought into harmony.
ther trucking groups are signing up for litigation to achieve the same end — although some of the details can vary. So you might want to keep that scorecard handy.
This editorial appears in the March 6 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.
