Driver Hours: A New Ballgame
Big changes are coming to how you do business
Contributing to this series of articles:
Oliver B. Patton, Washington Editor
Deborah Lockridge, Senior Editor
Evan Lockridge, Contributing Editor
John Bendel, Technology Editor
Deborah Whistler, Editor
Patricia Smith, Senior Editor
Jim Winsor, Executive Editor
Months will pass before the trucking industry gets a handle on the new hours of service rules, but one thing is clear right away: Big changes are coming to the business of delivering freight.
For starters, under the rules issued last month by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the workday will be shorter but drivers will have an extra hour for driving and two more hours for rest.
The working day is shorter in two ways. Under the current rule, a driver cannot drive after 15 hours logged as "on duty" but may actually work longer because time logged as "off-duty" is not part of the calculation. The new rule stops a driver's workday 14 hours from when it began, no matter how the time is logged.
On the other hand, the new rule allows 11 hours of driving in the 14-hour period, compared to 10 hours in the current rule.
Perhaps the most significant change, in terms of preventing fatigue, is the addition to two extra hours of rest in each duty cycle - 10 hours compared to the current eight hours.
While there is no formal 24-hour cycle, the new rule with its 14 hours of duty and 10 hours of rest sets up a 24-hour day. Sleep scientists say this is important for controlling fatigue, particularly in comparison to the current 18-hour day, which creates a backward schedule rotation that can promote fatigue.
This feature is a significant departure from the proposed rule issued three years ago, which mandated a 24-hour clock. The agency found that that approach, which is undeniably safer, simply will not work in an industry that goes 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The new rule retains the current limitation on weekly driving hours: either 60 hours in seven days or 70 hours in eight days. In the calculation of weekly hours, a driver may continue the current practice of not counting his daily "off-duty" hours, so he may continue working past 60 or 70 hours - although, again, he may not drive past those limits.
Also in the new rule is a provision that has long been sought by trucking interests: the ability to "restart" the weekly cycle after a set period of rest. Scientists have found that truck drivers tend to build up a "sleep debt" during the course of a work week that cannot be brought back into balance with just one night's sleep. So the new rule sets 34 hours - enough time for two sleep cycles - as the restart requirement.
There is an important exemption to these limits. When the safety agency studied the industry it found that short-haul freight operations, whose fatal-accident rate is considerably lower than that of long-haul operations, would suffer economically under a strict 14-hour daily limit. A typical operation in this category would be a regional less-than-truckload carrier whose pickup and delivery drivers regularly have a couple of days a week that are particularly busy.
The agency determined that the 14-hour rule would force this segment of the industry to hire at least 48,000 new drivers to provide the same level of service they provide now. So it decided to grant an exemption: Drivers may work an extra two hours one day in seven, provided they have been released from duty at their normal location for the five previous duty tours. The 16-hour day must end at the normal reporting location. The 34-hour break "restarts" this exemption.
In another difference between the final rule and the proposed rule, the agency decided to stick with current sleeper berth practices. The proposed rule said that only team drivers may split their off-duty time in berths, and the minimum time for each split would be five hours. The current rule allows single and team drivers to split their off-duty time in the berth, provided neither period is less than two hours. Off-duty time is, of course, changed to 10 hours.
Early feedback from the industry indicates that this exemption may become even more significant, because it offers a way to make the new 14-hour rule more flexible. Using the sleeper split, for example, a driver who has been kept waiting by a shipper might be able to extend his workday in order to complete his haul.
As in the current rule, breaks are taken at the discretion of the driver, or per company policy. This is a significant change from the proposed rule, which mandated two hours worth of breaks in segments of at least a half-hour.
In another important change from the proposed rule, the current exemptions for certain types of operations have been preserved. For example, agricultural operations remain exempt from driving time limits within a 100 air-mile radius of the farm or distribution point during planting or harvesting seasons. The proposed rule moved this and other exemptions under a new set of rules designed for work trucks.
To the great relief of many in the industry, the agency decided to drop its requirement for mandatory onboard recorders to track driver hours (see page 58).
Gone, also, is the idea of breaking the industry into different types of operations with different rules for each. Back in 1995, when the agency began revising the rules, the message it got from the trucking industry was that it should not try to make one rule fit all types of operations - the rules need to accommodate the complexity and variety of the industry. In an attempt to honor the industry's concern, the agency came up with a proposal that created five categories of operations and assigned a different set of restrictions to each type.
It was, as former FMCSA administrator Joseph Clapp put it, a "noble effort," but it didn't work.
The attempt to customize the rules produced an equation that was difficult for even the most seasoned veterans to understand, and impossible for roadside inspectors to enforce, so the agency backed off. The new rules apply to all truck drivers.
Bus drivers, on the other hand, will continue to operate under the current rules. They were included in the proposed rule, but after hearing the bus industry's objections and reviewing the docket, the agency found there simply is no data to indicate a fatigue-related problem among bus drivers.
Another controversial point in the proposed rule was a prohibition against companies contacting a driver during his off-duty time - the concern being that the phone call would disrupt the driver's rest. In revisiting the proposal, though, the agency found that it would not be able to enforce this prohibition. So it returned to the current rule, which permits contact during off-duty hours - but noted that it will continue to look into this issue.
The rules are much simpler than those proposed three years ago - but they are not necessarily easy to understand. Like the current rules, they will require official interpretations of specific situations. Companies and law enforcement officials alike are concerned about training - specifically, when to do it so drivers and police have enough time to learn the rules but don't have to wait too long to apply them.
Another issue likely to surface is parking. Now that drivers have more time to rest, where will they stop for rest, with roadside areas either filled to overflowing or closed to truckers?
It is apparent even at this early stage that the new 14-hour rule will change the relationship between carriers and shippers who routinely keep drivers waiting for loading or unloading. The new rule offers drivers significantly less flexibility for this kind of disruption. Trucking companies, particularly in the truckload sector, believe that shippers and receivers are going to have to learn a new way of doing business.
Driver Rules continued...
