Government Eases Rules for Long and Short Haul

The Bush administration Friday permanently relaxed rules governing how many hours a day truckers may spend behind the wheel, issuing regulations that would allow them to continue spending 11 hours each day on the road -- a move denounced by consumer safety advocates.

The Transportation Department said the new rules would improve highway safety because they also shorten a trucker’s overall workday and increase required rest periods between shifts. But consumer advocates said the rules were a giveaway to the trucking industry and a significant step backward.

The Bush administration adopted new rules in 2003, but safety advocates sued, winning a federal ruling that set aside the trucking regulations. The rules announced Friday replace the administration’s previous regulations with a nearly identical set.

The rules, which take effect in October, allow 11 hours of driving in a single stretch, up from the 10-hour limit that had been in effect until 2003. The new regulations would allow truckers to drive up to 77 hours per week, up from 60.

The rules shorten the overall workday from 15 hours to 14 and require truckers with sleeper berths to take longer breaks by spending at least eight continuous hours in bed. The old rules allowed rest periods to be split up.

But at the same time, the rules largely deregulate short-haul truckers, even eliminating the requirement that they keep records of how many hours they work.

These rules come weeks after the president signed the new highway bill, which relaxed work-hour requirements for truckers in other ways. In that law, utility company drivers, movie and television production drivers, livestock drivers and even those hauling animal feed were exempted from the law. The issue has been the subject of strenuous lobbying in Washington, with the trucking industry, the motion picture industry, retailers such as Wal-Mart, unions and safety advocates all working on the issue.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which regulates trucking, justified Friday’s action to reinstate the rules despite the July 2004 court ruling by pointing to new research.

“The court did not require us to write a stricter rule,” said the agency’s administrator, Annette Sandberg.

Sandberg said at a news conference that the agency lost the case on narrow technical grounds for not having scientific justifications for the rules. Since then, she said, the agency had conducted more research, outfitting rigs with video cameras, motion detectors and black-box type instrumentation to monitor drivers’ fatigue, sleep and hours of work.

“The research shows that this new rule will improve driver health and safety and the safety of our roadways,” she said. “Ensuring drivers obtain necessary rest and restorative sleep will save lives.”

Public safety advocates and truckers said the rules would lead to more hazardous conditions on the nation’s highways.

“It reduces weekly off-duty time for the most exhausted drivers (truckers who drive the maximum number of allowable hours) and significantly weakens safety requirements for short-haul drivers,” Joan Claybrook, president of the consumer group Public Citizen, said in a statement.

Public Citizen was among the groups that sued last year to overturn the administration’s first set of revised rules.

James P. Hoffa, general president of the Teamsters Union, disagreed with the new rules.

“This proposed rule is yet another outrageous power grab by ruthless companies,” he said. “Some greedy employers are trying to squeeze drivers to enrich their bottom line at the expense of public safety on America’s highways.”

Bill Graves, president of the American Trucking Assns., an industry lobbying group, praised the provisions announced Friday.

The change “confirms our research that the current hours-of-service rules have been measurably effective in improving safety on our nation’s highways, providing for the health of truck drivers and assuring the efficient transport of our nation’s goods,” he wrote.

Safety advocates and the Teamsters were particularly critical of the changes applying to short-haul drivers -- workers who deliver packages, furniture and other goods within 150 miles of a home base. That group includes local delivery routes operated by firms such as United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp.

The agency made it much harder to enforce hours-of-service rules on short-run truckers by allowing more of them to drive without manually logging how many hours a day they are on the road.

“We had lots of comments about the cost impacts of the short-haul” rules, Sandberg said. “We looked at the crash data that found they were 52% of the registered trucks and less than 10% of the fatality picture.”

The agency could not provide numbers on how many miles short-run drivers account for, compared with long-haul truckers.

Some safety advocates said the logs would be unnecessary if more trucks had black-box-type data recorders, which could reveal how long truckers had been driving. But the Transportation Department has yet to implement such a requirement even on long-haul trucks. Such a rule is expected early next year.

The Transportation Department played down the importance of trucker fatigue as a safety problem, saying it was to blame in 5.5% of all fatal collisions involving trucks.

The new rules may increase continuous periods of sleep that drivers get, according to Rich Hanowski, a researcher at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

Under a contract with the Transportation Department to study drivers’ behavior, Hanowski used wristwatch motion detectors to determine when they were asleep. He found that under the new rules, drivers would sleep an average of 6.25 hours per night. He said studies of drivers under the old rules found they slept only five hours per night.

He also said studies showed no significant difference in crashes between the 10th and 11th hours of driving. But he cautioned that the 11th-hour studies were based on a small sample size.

Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a Washington-based group backed by the insurance industry, pointed to evidence that the 2003 changes were dangerous, saying truckrelated highway fatalities increased from 5,036 in 2003 to 5,190 in 2004.