Issues of safety always stir strong emotions and passion. All Mainers, just like all Americans, want their families and their children to be safe, especially when on the road.
When debating or discussing safety issues, hard as it may be, emotions should be checked at the door and policymakers should deal with evidence and facts because that’s the best and perhaps the only way to get to good, strong laws and regulations.
In the most recent heated debate on safety in the trucking industry, the facts and evidence squarely back the actions championed by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in the soon-to-be enacted omnibus spending bill.
Collins’ language doesn’t “roll back safety,” advance an “anti-safety agenda” or make truck drivers work longer hours as her critics have repeatedly claimed.
The fact is, this small provision does none of this. It gives drivers the flexibility to get rest when they need it and stay off the roads at times of the day when the risk of a crash is highest.
A little history is instructive: After trucking operated for nearly a decade under a driver hours-of-service rule that helped contribute to a 27 percent decline in truck-involved crashes, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration bowed to political pressure in 2010 and began revising the rule.
As a result, the agency imposed new restrictions in 2013 on an existing component of the rule — what is known in the industry as the 34-hour restart. These new restrictions forced drivers to have two periods between 1 and 5 a.m. in their 34-hour restart in order to reset their weekly work and driving clocks. Further, the FMCSA prevented drivers from using this extended rest period more than once in a 168-hour period, or, in plain language, from using it more than once a week.
The problem with these added one-size-fits-all restrictions is, while the FMCSA claimed they would reduce fatigue and save lives, no one examined whether they would harm safety in unintended ways or how much they really would cost. Once implemented in 2013, trucking found these restrictions raised crash risk for all motorists, which is our primary concern, but they also have hurt drivers’ lifestyles and our industry’s productivity — all for a theoretical safety gain and perhaps even a net increase in crashes.
Let me explain. By requiring the two 1 to 5 a.m. periods, the rule is pushing drivers, dispatchers and logistics managers to modify schedules to have trucks head out on the highway in the early morning hours, which is statistically the riskiest time of day for trucks and cars and school buses to share the road together. The American public knows this, as evidenced by a national poll that showed 67 percent of voters preferred trucks be on the road at night rather than in the morning.
By pushing truck traffic into the morning commuting hours, these restrictions raise crash risk, but that risk was never studied by FMCSA.
Our critics use contemptible hyperbole to continually make the claim that truckers will now be forced to drive outrageous schedules — even though they must recognize the only thing being proposed is to go back to the previous rules that produced indisputable and significant safety improvements. Their argument is disingenuous because they know it is predicated on unlikely, improbable and imaginary logistics.
Thankfully, in the real world, because of Collins and many of her colleagues — including several prominent Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee — these restrictions will be suspended until FMCSA fully researches their potential impacts. From an early age, many of us were told to “show our work” when turning in an assignment. Now Congress is holding FMCSA to that same standard when it comes to these rules.
Brian Parke is president and CEO of the Maine Motor Transport Association.