TORONTO -- Carriers worried about the DOT's plans to slash driving hours, among other hours-of service changes, got a proverbial lump of coal from Uncle Sam today.

At first glance the changes don't appear to be as drastic as some carriers feared – or critics wanted – but there are more than a few and they could still significantly alter how trucking has operated these last seven years.

As expected, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has proposed changes to the maximum amount of hours truckers can drive from 11 hours to possibly 10 hours.

Some good news is that the 10-hour limit isn't set in stone. Regulators say they could still retain the 11-hour limit depending on the feedback during the comment period, but the agency did specify it "favors a 10-hour limit."

Regulators held off on altering the 60 or 70 hour-window workweeks, but unlike the current rules, restarts are restricted to one restart during that period.

They also avoided significantly tinkering with the 34-hour restart – except that the rules would now require two consecutive off-duty periods from midnight to 6 a.m during the restart. Drivers would be allowed to use this restart only once during a seven-day period.

The 14-hour workday window is also technically intact, but now would require that drivers complete all on-duty work-related activities, including non-driving, within 13 hours to allow for at least a mandatory one-hour break. And, drivers won't be able to drive more than seven hours without taking at least a 30-minute break.

Despite fears that FMCSA was drastically turning
the clock back on HOS, the changes
don't appear to be as bad some originally feared.

Though, to offset the impact, another provision would extend a driver's daily shift to 16 hours twice a week to accommodate for lost time loading and unloading at terminals or ports, and allowing drivers to count some time spent parked in their trucks toward off-duty hours.

Some more modest flexibility: The current rules state a driver sitting in a parked truck counts as on-duty time, unless he's in the sleeper. But now, resting in a parked truck is no longer considered on-duty.

There was some faint hope that the agency might have considered restoring the split sleeper berth provision that allowed drivers to break up the two rest periods in blocks of their own choosing, but that won't be the case. The mandatory eight consecutive hours off remains, however.

Drivers who violate the proposed rule would face civil penalties of up to $2,750 for each offense and carriers that allow their drivers to break the rules would face fines of up to $11,000.

The long-awaited rewrite has been pending since last June. The proposal was cleared by the White House Office of Management and Budget earlier this month and details were published by the Federal Motor carrier safety Administration today. (The full proposal will be published on Dec. 29. For now, the FMCSA has posted the key points of the proposal here.)

That effectively means that there's just six months before the FMCSA's deadline of July 2011 to publish a final rule, which worries carriers that there may not be enough time for the agency to process and consider the loads of comments the new proposal is expected to attract.

Despite the FMCSA's previous admissions that the current rules are quite safe and the industry has experienced a sizable reduction in truck-involved accidents since they were introduced in 2004, the agency made good on a promise it made last year to The Teamsters and Public Citizen about toughening up the rules if the groups suspended their court challenges against the department for supposedly not "considering the health of drivers" when it wrote the rules.

It's unclear whether these changes appease Public Citizen, which wanted – absurdly – eight hours of driving time, among other radically changes. (The group hadn't issued an official response by this posting).

In fact, it doesn’t appear they'll make anyone on either side of the debate happy.

Even if the Teamsters and Public Citizen agree to keep their swords down, the Obama-led FMCSA could be trading one long legal battle for the start of another – especially if the daily driving limit is reduced to 10 hours.

The American Trucking Associations have already stated that it could launch its own lawsuit on the basis that the agency has little justification for turning back the clock on HOS when its own scientific research on circadian rhythms and the available safety data provides a strong case for keeping the current rules intact.

"ATA's litigator is fully engaged in this process and is already preparing the 'litigation file' for use, if necessary," Dave Osiecki, ATA's VP of Safety, Security & Operations, tells todaystrucking.com.

Hard-pressed to argue safety benefits, the Obama administration is trying to justify its proposed changes as needed to improve driver health, says Osiecki. "One big problem for the Obama folks though -- the FMCSA has consistently gone on record, with supporting data, over the last five years, stating the current HOS rules are having no negative effect on driver health."

It's the ATA's view that the assault on HOS is organized labor’s effort to swell its ranks by forcing carriers to hire more drivers to haul the same amount of freight -- drivers whom the Teamsters "would hope some day to organize."

"By further restricting truck driver productivity, the Obama Administration is choosing politics over highway safety," Osiecki continues. "These proposed changes will force the use of more inexperienced truck drivers to fill the productivity void. This is almost certain to result in more highway crashes as new, inexperienced drivers present more than three times the risk of crashes than their more experienced counterparts."

MORE INDUSTRY REACTION

Awaiting details of the changes north of the border, Canadian Trucking Alliance CEO David Bradley said the new rules aren't too surprising. "The dye was pretty much cast when the DOT and the anti-truck groups reached an agreement that saw the court challenges against the current rules dropped; we certainly weren’t expecting things to become more flexible," he wrote us in an email.

Still, the proposed changes don't appear to be as bad as first thought, Bradley says.

Bradley points out that the rest-and-recovery provision (or reset) was originally a Canadian invention (it's 36 hours here) and it was adopted because it provides adequate time for a driver to have two extended sleep periods. He says he's glad it was generally retained.

But he sees a problem with stricter fixed working windows, such as the requirement that all on-duty work-related activities be completed in 13 hours.

"The problem with mandating specific off-duty periods is that they can force drivers to stop when they do not feel like resting, which in turn may cause them to not to take a nap when they’re tired," he says, "Everyone is different in this regard. The more prescriptive you get the more potential problems this may cause."

Meanwhile, Bradley doesn't expect Canadian regulators to catch HOS-reform fever.

"Things could change, but I don’t sense the Canadian governments want to open the hours of service can of worms right now. There is no safety justification for doing so," he says, adding that several provinces have yet to fully mirror the 2007 federal regs.

Not only are the changes a "pain" for operations people, says Kevin Johnson, director of Risk Management at B.C.-based Coastal Pacific Xpress, but the possibility of 10 hours driving could definitely "contribute to the perfect storm to make the professional driver shortage worse."

At 10 hours, he says, "you might be able to do it with the same number of drivers at first but eventually things are going to slow down the system," he says. "An hour difference for perishable products doesn’t mean it’ll get to the shelf one hour later. If you have to go into reset you could be stopped for 10 hours and if you have to wait another cycle, products will start arriving later and later."

CPX is widely considered one of the most driver-friendly fleets in North America, but Johnson doesn’t think the changes will provide any qualifiable health improvement to drivers.

"If they really want to address driver fatigue they should focus on sleep disorders, awareness, fatigue risk management, more rest areas for drivers."

DRIVERS' WINDOW

Although critics of the current rule insist the changes will benefit drivers, none of the half-dozen we spoke to at the Fifth Wheel Truck Stop in Grimbsy, Ont. thought the government or Public Citizen are doing them any favors.

While a lesser workday might be appealing to a few drivers, most recognize that you can't cover the same miles in less time. The change will cut back daily miles and, of course, the produced income attached to them. (In fact, Osiecki notes that when FMCSA previously evaluated the option of 10 hours, driver productivity was estimated to go down about seven percent).

"I think it's a joke," says Bernie White, a company driver from Coopersville, Mich. "It's hard enough to make money as it is. They're going to lose a lot of drivers because they just won't be able to make any money unless they raise the wages … and you know they're not going to do that. I've seen a lot of changes since 1974, and I can tell you, things don't get easier."

A London, Ont. owner-op who asked his name not be published said that the lesser hours would take money from his pocket when he goes south of the border. "They may as well kick everybody in the nuts because no one will be able to make any money. The government is just regulating everyone to death -- in every industry, not just trucking."

Dave Harris, a liquid bulk hauler stopping in from Newark, Delaware, says the HOS revisions are another example of the Obama Administration being too overzealous.

"I think it's ridiculous," he told us. "I'm sure the companies are going to raise Cain over that. They'll have to find more drivers.

"I'm no fan of Obama. I don't like his policies or the way he spends our money."