In The News

Eye on Trucking: They’re baaaack: those groups assail HOS once again

Hey, Ray.
Welcome to the job.
Hey, Ray.
We’re baaaack.

Well, actually those weren’t the exact words that opened the letter from a group of six organizations to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.

It actually read like this: “Congratulations on your appointment and confirmation as Secretary of Transportation. (List of organizations) look forward to working cooperatively with you on the transportation safety issues confronting the Department and the nation.”

Now, do something about these pesky Hours of Service (implied, not written).

LaHood’s head must be spinning faster than the wheels on Junior’s racecar.

In less than two months, the Cross Border Demonstration Project has been dumped, President Barack Obama has told the various stakeholders they’d better put together another such project, the Mexicans have retaliated by imposing tariff hikes on certain goods and the president of a major carrier says it’s just flat unsafe for American drivers to be tooling around in Mexico anyway.

Yeah, welcome Ray.

And remember folks, the trucking industry is only one part of his job.

Planes, trains, automobiles, concrete, asphalt, congestion, bad bridges, you name it, Ray’s responsible.

Those groups that have filed the third suit against HOS are still concerned about driver fatigue.

“We have taken this action with the conviction, based on research and scientific data, that longer driving and working hours are unsafe and promote driver fatigue,” the groups wrote in the letter to LaHood. “We challenged the two major features of the HOS that promote even greater driver fatigue: the provision increasing permissible consecutive driving hours from 10 hours to 11 hours and the provision commonly called the ‘34-hour restart,’ which enables drivers to drive and work substantially longer hours per week than under the HOS rules that prevailed until the 2003 HOS rule took effect.

“These provisions of the HOS regulations adopted by the previous Administration not only increased the daily driving hours beyond those already proven to generate high levels of driver fatigue, but also exacerbated the chronic health problems that are widespread among professional drivers.”

Data does not appear to support the groups’ claims.

In the 2006 Trucks Involved in Fatal Accidents report (the latest year available), only 1.5 percent of fatal accidents were directly attributed to fatigue.

There is also non-empirical evidence that the number of truckers driving through the 11th hour is not that high.

We liked what John Hill, the former Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator, said about HOS and the lawsuit.

“If they [the groups] are truly committed to big gains in safety in the trucking and bus industry, they should be petitioning FMCSA to implement rules that will have permanent and significant reductions in crashes, deaths and injuries by asking for stability control systems and adaptive cruise control with active braking on commercial vehicles.  With those kinds of technologies on trucks and buses, we will likely see 25-35 percent reductions in crashes.”

Hill’s statement is backed up by a recently released FMCSA cost benefit analysis of onboard safety systems (see article on Page 8)

Among other findings, the report said:

It was estimated that between 8,597 and 18,013 rear end crashes could be prevented through the use of a forward collision warning system. According to the 2006 TIFA data, 20.8 percent of the 5,250 fatal truck accidents involved a rear end collision. It was estimated that lane departure warning systems would prevent between 3,863 and 8,103 lane departure-related accidents. Around 23 percent of the fatal accidents in 2006 were the result of inappropriate lane departures, and It was estimated that between 1,422 and 2.037 combination vehicle rollover crashes in curves could be prevented through the use of roll stability control systems. In 2006, in 4.3 percent of the fatal accidents a rollover was listed as the “first event.”
We agree with Hill, and we think LaHood probably would, too.

Now let’s see where the judges land.

Lyndon Finney of The Trucker staff can be reached for comment at [email protected].