Sen. Feinstein Calls For Trucking Industry Reform

Critics of recorder proposal blast agency

Highway Safety Groups Criticize Federal Agency “Do Nothing” Rule That Can’t Protect Americans from Overworked, Sleep-Deprived Truck Drivers

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Will Allow Nearly All Motor Carriers to Continue to Operate in Interstate Commerce with Worthless, Widely Falsified Paper Logbooks

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the agency created by Congress to improve the safety of commercial motor vehicles traveling across the U.S., today proposed a weak regulation that will require virtually no motor carriers to install Electronic On-Board Recorders (EOBRs) on big trucks and buses to show how long truck and bus drivers have been at the wheels of their commercial motor vehicles.

EOBRs can automatically record the hours that commercial operators drive trucks and motorcoaches in interstate commerce.  EOBRs can also link with engines, transmissions, and global positioning system (GPS) devices to record the distance a big truck has traveled, whether it has used an illegal route, and how fast it has gone.  Currently, all European Union countries, along with Turkey, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Venezuela require automated recording devices to monitor driver hours of service compliance.

“The proposed rule is so weak that even the tiny percentage of truck or bus companies that might be required to use EOBRs – only a little more than one-tenth of one percent -- will be allowed to remove them after only two years of use,” emphasized Jacqueline Gillan, vice-president, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety (Advocates).  “Furthermore, the agency is not proposing to require EOBRS to record other critical information such as the speeds of trucks and buses,” she added.

The vast majority of motor carriers – more than 99 percent of them, according to FMCSA’s proposed rule – will continue using paper logbooks to record driver hours of service while operating a truck or bus.  The federal hours of service regulations specify how long a driver can operate a truck each day and over several consecutive days.  The regulations also specify the amount of time a driver must take in order to have an opportunity for sleep and rest.

Paper logbooks are called “comic books” because they are widely falsified by truck drivers and their companies, according to research sponsored by FMCSA itself.  “Hours of service violations are routine among big truck drivers,” said Daphne Izer, founder, Parents Against Tired Truckers (P.A.T.T.).  “Thousands of truck drivers make false entries on their logbooks every day to hide violations of excessive hours worked or driven, or drivers not taking the minimum amount of off-duty time to get critically needed sleep to avoid driving fatigued,” she added.

The regulations controlling how long a commercial driver can work and drive, and the minimum amount of time the driver must rest, were weakened by FMCSA in 2003 in a regulation that dramatically increased the amount of time over 7 or 8 consecutive days that a truck driver could work by up to 40 percent and drive by nearly 30 percent.  That regulation was overturned in federal appellate court in a scathing opinion.  FMCSA essentially re-issued the same regulation in 2005 that had been rejected by the court the previous year.  Public Citizen, Advocates, CRASH, and P.A.T.T. are challenging that second regulation again in federal court.

“This proposed regulation shows that FMCSA is not really serious about reducing the nearly 5,000 deaths each year caused by big truck crashes,” said Advocates’ Senior Research Director, Gerald Donaldson.  “Even the specifications for the EOBRs are unacceptably weak by allowing even certain kinds of cell phones to be used to record truck driver hours of service,” he added.

FMCSA plans to perform safety compliance reviews on motor carriers to see if there are more than 10 percent hours of service violations.  Only when a motor carrier gets two “strikes” against it for having more than 10 percent violations in two compliance review two years apart would it then be required to install EOBRs.

“Because FMCSA each year only performs safety compliance reviews on less than 1.5 percent of the more than 700,000 motor carriers currently registered with the agency, only a tiny percentage of big trucks and buses will ever have EOBRs to show how long their drivers were at the wheel” said Joan Claybrook, President, Public Citizen and Chair, Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH).  “The agency’s effort at safety oversight and enforcement is so pitifully weak that it is a sure bet that almost no motor carriers will be found with the level of violations that will require them to install EOBRs,” she added.

Even if the agency finds more than 10 percent violations in the first compliance review, it will not trigger any penalties against the truck or bus company.  Sanctions would be imposed by FMCSA only if a second compliance review again finds more than 10 percent hours of service violations within 2 years of the first violation. 

 “My son was killed by a tired trucker, and this rule will allow unsafe truck companies to continue operating even with evidence that they are flagrantly violating the law and putting tired truckers behind the wheel of a big rig,” said Izer.

FMCSA also proposed that older recording devices that do not meet even the minimum specifications of the proposed regulation would be able to continue to be used until the company phases them out.

Safety groups plan to file detailed comments with the agency showing that FMCSA has once again failed its statutory mission to enhance motor carrier safety to the highest feasible level.  Congress stated in 1999 that this was the top priority of the agency when it created FMCSA in order to reduce truck deaths and injuries.  However, in the past six years more than 30,000 people have been killed in truck-related crashes and a half million more injured. FMCSA repeatedly has failed to make any significant improvements in commercial motor vehicle safety in any of their safety regulations.