HOS Safety Improvements
New hours rules are helping drivers and improving safety. Should we have to fix what ain't broke?
Deborah Whistler
Editor
Truck driver hours of service rules hadn't been changed since they were adopted in 1932. An attempt to change them in 2000 was met with such universal disapproval, the Department of Transportation was sent back to the drawing board. They came back with revised changes, which went into effect January 2004.
Here we are a year later, and the feds are again asking for information in order to change the changes.
This time, the do-over of the rules was dictated by the courts, who agreed with safety groups that some provisions in the new rules could make drivers less safe than before.
But that doesn't appear to be the case.
Several senior trucking officials spoke before government officials and the transportation research community in mid-January at the Washington, D.C. meeting of the Transportation Research Board. They said drivers' lives had improved under the new rules, mostly because the shipper community is showing more respect for drivers.
The biggest news came from two truckload carrier representatives, who claim accidents have decreased substantially under the new rules.
Greer Woodruff, vice president of corporate safety at JB Hunt Inc., says the fleet's DOT-reportable accidents went down 10%, preventable reportable accidents decreased 16%, and driver injuries dipped a whopping 20%. Hunt spent $2.9 million to implement the new hours of service regulations. They also began 15 other safety-related initiatives that could contribute to the safety improvement. But Woodruff attributes most of the improvement to hours of service changes. The "new hours of service rules have changed safety," he said.
Schneider National witnessed a 40% reduction in preventable major accidents, according to Don Osterberg, vice president of capacity development and safety. Like J.B. Hunt, Schneider also has seen a big reduction in lost time from driver injury accidents. Osterberg said he also hedged the numbers because, like Hunt, his company introduced other safety initiatives at the same time - such as the use of driver training simulators - that could also be influencing the reductions.
Without giving specific numbers, Steve Niswander, vice president for safety at Groendyke, said the percentage of accidents was down, the severity was down "significantly,"and the on-the-job driver injury was down 10% to 15% for the company's bulk tank operation.
Because of the nature of LTL operations, David Miller, president of Con-Way Southern Express, said the new hours of service have had no impact on his carrier's linehaul safety, but that the 34-hour restart has allowed for easier logging and better compliance with recordkeeping.
Professor Mike Belzer of Wayne State University said he believed the hours of service increased respect for drivers' time, allowed drivers to get better rest, and placed them on a more regular schedule.
The carrier executives addressed several of the concerns raised in the U.S. Court of Appeals' decision last July - namely the 11th hour of driving, the use of the 34-hour restart and the use of split sleeper berths. These are the main subjects they want comments on from the nation's fleets.
Schneider said it doesn't utilize any of practices in question on a regular basis. In fact, only 10% of Schneider's drivers were driving 11 hours a day, only 26% to 32% were using the 34-hour restart, and only 6% were using the split sleeper berth option.
Osterberg said compliance with the sleeper berth rule has decreased over time and that last November, less than 1% of Schneider's drivers were using it. Miller said Con-Way's LTL operation is using the 34-hour restart extensively on weekends, but only using the 11th hour rule 11% or 12% of the time.
However, a spokesman for the Owner-Operator Drivers Assn. said 10% of its members are being asked by carriers to use the split sleeper berth in order to mask loading waiting times.
Both truckload companies reported operational impacts during the last year. On the positive front, live pickups were down 6.8% for J.B. Hunt (because of more pre-loading), hours at loading docks were down 2.2%, and hours at unloading docks were down 12.9%. Hunt also reported more accessorial charges in an effort to get shippers to pay for unproductive practices at the docks. The percentage of loads with detention was up 101% and the detention charges per load was up 25%. Both fleets credited the use of trailer tracking to produce useful and reliable data to justify charging for lost driver time.
On the negative side, productivity was down for both of the panel's large truckload carriers, albeit not as much as expected. Woodruff said that Hunt measured productivity as cycle time (the transit duration from first dispatch to empty call) and found it to be up 4.3%, indicating a loss in productivity. However, that was less than the 8% to 10% loss the carrier had predicted. Woodruff indicated that the drop was not as bad as forecast because (1) positive changes in shipper/receiver behavior has reduced the overall negative impacts and (2) growth in the economy and freight has allowed Hunt to stop serving inefficient shippers.
While Schneider's data was not quite as extensive, Osterberg did say the carrier is seeing a 3% to 6% drop in productivity. He seconded Woodruff's observation that the numbers are not as bad as originally predicted because the carrier was able to be more selective in its freight selection. Both panelists noted that the change in shipper behavior has not yet been translated to the receiver level.
So what does this all mean?
Certainly the large reduction in accidents caused many jaws to drop, including those of a number of DOT officials. And the numbers clearly show the court's concern over driver health and welfare is unfounded. The number of driver injuries are down, drivers are better rested, and it appears that drivers are getting more respect from shippers, which has traditionally been their biggest complaint about the job.
The data from two of the nation's largest truckload carriers also shows that the court's concern for misuse of the 11th hour, the 34-hour restart, and the split sleeper berth is unfounded. These provisions are being used judiciously - they give truck drivers more flexibility.
The question is, how will DOT react to the data? It is clearly speculative to assume that other carriers with different operations or smaller fleets operations will have the same results. Because the direct impacts of changes in the hours of services cannot be isolated, it is also unwise to assume that if the hours of service were reduced even further, the number of accidents would drop even more dramatically.
In fact, during the same DOT meeting, preliminary results were released from DOT's Large Truck Accident Causation Study (large being amusingly defined as over 10,000 pounds GVW). In a thorough analysis of 281 two-vehicle crashes, trucks were only at fault in 30% of the accidents. And fatigue was only listed at be the related factor in 5% of the truck-caused crashes, as compared with 13% of the car-caused crashes.
Finally, while the productivity losses were not as great as originally projected, they clearly are present. Had the changes taken place during a time when the economy was not as robust as it is today, the productivity losses would have been much higher - primarily because if there had been no capacity crunch, there would be no economic incentive for shippers to change their business practices at the docks.
Any improvement in productivity clearly now rests on the shipper's customers - the receivers. It's unlikely receivers will change their ways as quickly as the shippers. They don't directly face the same economic incentives. However, as inefficient receivers are identified by carriers using sophisticated activity-based costing systems and trailer-tracking technologies, pressure will intensify for more logistical coordination among all three partners in the transportation chain - shippers, carriers and receivers - especially if capacity remains tight.
As for the recent call for comment on yet again changing the hours of service rules (see story on page 22), if you have discovered the same safety improvements and a lack of problems brought to bear in the court decision, be sure to comment to DOT. You have until March 10 to influence what changes will be made.
If your data runs along the same lines, the question now is: Should we have to fix - at considerable expense - what ain't broke?
Contributing to this article was Lana Batts,
Larsen, Batts, Welborn & Co. LLC
E-mail Deb at dwhistler@truckinginfo.com
