Letters to the Editor: Opening the Borders, HOS (Cont’d.)
These letters appear in the Sept. 10 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Opening the Borders
If the U.S. Department of Transportation grants entry to a Mexican truck, Transport Canada won’t do anything to keep it out of Canada.
There is a lot more than the safety issue. It’s the economics, too. Who will take advantage of the situation? The big shippers and receivers will. This will put many small trucking businesses in jeopardy.
There is enough price-cutting already.
Jean Catudal
Owner-Operator
Yamaska, Québec
Hours of Service
Nobody out there seems to remember what “70 hours in any eight-day period” really meant. When they changed the rule to a 34-hour restart, it added about 25 extra hours to an already overworked driver’s week.
Rather than messing with the hours of service, though, drivers need to start logging everything they do while on duty instead of hiding all the “on-duty-not-
driving” time they perform by logging it as “off duty.”
Then, we would have safer, more alert drivers.
Jerry Vannatta
Linehaul Driver
ABF Freight System
Brownsburg, Ind.
Maybe you’re approaching this from the wrong perspective. Instead of whining to the courts, bring a class-action lawsuit against the judges, individually, and the individual members of the groups that caused all this.
If they had to pay for retooling the industry to satisfy their ideas, you can bet money they wouldn’t be so adamant about changing an industry they obviously know little or nothing about.
Even better, everyone involved in forcing the changes on us would have to work under the regulations for six months in their world before it is passed on to us.
Think of them being stuck at their workstations for 14 hours, fined a week’s pay if they did any work after 11 hours — and then be required to retire to a clothes closet for eight hours before they could eat, go to the bathroom or do any of the normal things people do after work. That would get their attention about just how cruel, dehumanizing, degrading and insulting their dysfunctional ideas are.
Chuck Shepard
Chief Executive Officer
Shepard Enterprises
Clifton, Colo.
Here we go again — the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Every time a significant hours-of-service issue goes against the position of American Trucking Associations and big trucking interests, the whole of the supply chain supposedly comes to a grinding halt.
The reality is that it will not. Adjustments will be made and trucking will go on much as it al-ways has.
In both decisions to vacate the hours-of-service rules, the court indicated those decisions were at least influenced by research suggesting that longer driving times and cumulative fatigue issues were detrimental to the safety and health of drivers. This research was largely conducted by, or for, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. It is not rocket science. Fatigue negatively affects a person’s ability to drive.
Just try to drive for 11 straight hours. Can anyone honestly say reaction times, eye movements and mental alertness are as good in the 11th hour as in the first or second or third or fourth hour — or even the 10th?
Now try doing that for five or six straight days.
The 34-hour restart is — or was — a wonderful tool for drivers who struggle with logbooks. Not be-cause of the 34 hours of rest, but because the restart simplified the recording of duty requirements and enforcement issues.
FMCSA needs to step up and ask the courts for a stay so that new rulemaking can proceed. And this time, they need to address the issues they should have addressed the first time:
• Reasonable driving times based on sound research (possibly 10 hours).
• A reasonable restart period (possibly 48 hours).
• Enforcement tools that work (onboard recorders phased in over a reasonable period).
• Provisions in the sleeper-berth rules that prevent a continuous change in sleep patterns.
The real issue is quality of life for those who choose truck driving as a career path. If the industry does not recognize the need to address the safety and health of the drivers, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past and a sure continuation of the driver shortage, because the vocation will not attract new drivers.
If we continue to ask these persons to work longer and be away from home longer — in a job that is consistently one of the most dangerous — for less money than an average skilled laborer makes, we will never fill the demand for drivers.
It would seem that we have a conundrum: Which comes first — the truck or the truck driver?
Kenneth Morris
Consultant
Risk Consultants Inc.
Atlanta
