Upcoming restrictions to the 34-hour restart provision of the hours-of-service rule for truck drivers will cost the trucking industry $189 million annually — a $322 million difference from the $133 million benefit that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration estimated when it wrote the new restrictions, according to a new American Transportation Research Institute study.
FMCSA’s reliance on driver logs from carriers undergoing compliance reviews, in addition to the agency’s estimate that only 15% of drivers would be affected by the new restrictions, contributed to the grossly incorrect cost-benefit analysis, the ATRI study said.
For a copy of the report, click here to visit ATRI’s website, http://atri-online.org.
“We know that the 34-hour restart changes are going to have a significant impact on our operations and across the entire supply chain,” said Steve Niswander, vice president of safety policy for Groendyke Transport and chairman of ATRI’s research advisory committee.
“ATRI’s analysis clearly documents the costs that our fleet and fleets across the country are likely to experience when these changes take effect on July 1,” he said in a statement.
The changes, which FMCSA will start enforcing July 1, will mean that drivers can only use the 34-hour restart to reset their weekly driving limits once every seven days. In addition, the restart will have to include two periods from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.
An agency spokesman declined to comment on the research, although an FMCSA official defended the hours-of-service rule at a trucking conference in late April.
The restart changes are part of a set of new restrictions on hours-of-service, including a requirement that drivers take 30-minute rest breaks before driving more than eight hours at a time.
When it published the rule for the changes in December 2011, FMCSA said that the safety and driver health benefits would add up to $205 million a year. ATRI analyzed the data to isolate the $133 million estimate from FMCSA for the restart changes, it said.
