Three Strikes: Interest groups challenge HOS rules again

WASHINGTON, D.C. — They got tenacity, give ’em that.

It seems that every holidays season, a coalition of safety-special interest groups finds a way to dump a lump of coal in the Dept of Transportation’s stocking.

The groups — Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Public Citizen, the Truck Safety Coalition and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters –filed a petition for reconsideration Thursday with the administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA).

The groups are reacting to the FMCSA’s recent final hours-of-service rule keeping in place the 11-hour driving and 34-hour restart provisions. Truck drivers are also limited to driving for only 11 hours and working for no more than 14 hours each day.

Last December, only a week after the coalition published a similar HOS rule, the coalition filed a motion in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, arguing the government failed to follow previous court-ordered rules.

The court ordered FMCSA to amend the rule once again, but only because the agency "failed to give interested parties an opportunity to comment on the methodology of the crash-risk model used to justify the maximum daily and weekly hours drivers could work."

A subsequent court ruling may have convinced FMCSA the rule was generally sound, by keeping the 11-hour driving and 34-hour restart provisions in place on an interim basis.

The final rule, therefore, will become effective Jan. 19, 2009, the day before the new federal administration takes over.

With typical Public Citizen-style rhetoric, the group said the government is forcing drivers to work "in rolling sweatshops."
"Under this rule, companies can force interstate truck drivers to work and drive grueling hours that are unheard of in other U.S. workplaces in the 21st century," said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen.

The new regime, however, cuts down on time actually driving from the previous rule in place before 2004. Furthermore, there’s new evidence emerging that changes the way fatigue should be viewed.

The petition asks FMCSA to reconsider the regulation based on "numerous errors and misrepresentations of research findings clearly showing that much longer working and driving hours will inevitably produce severely fatigued drivers who also can suffer serious health problems from excessively long working hours."

A spokesman for American Trucking Associations, speaking to its official publication Transport Topics, dismissed the challenge as "unsupported and ill-timed."