1. Do trucks pose a significant safety problem?

Yes. More than 5,000 people have been killed annually in truck-related crashes for the past several years. Large trucks are severely over represented in annual crash figures. Although they are only 3 percent of the registered vehicles, they are responsible for 12 to 13 percent of passenger vehicle occupant deaths each year Ð about 4,000 fatalities. Nearly one in four passenger vehicle deaths in multiple-vehicle collisions involve a large truck. In fact, large trucks are involved in multiple-vehicle fatal crashes at twice the rate of passenger vehicles. In addition, nearly 800 large truck occupants, almost all of them drivers, also die each year in these crashes.

The reasons for this excessive contribution to annual crash figures include the unwieldy size, weight, braking ability, and maneuverability of big combination and single-unit trucks. These factors, and the fact that trucks often involve far more vehicles in a crash than do passenger vehicles, combine to make truck safety a serious problem.

Driver fatigue is another major reason for the high level of truck crashes each year. The reality is that many thousands of truck drivers are operating their commercial vehicles in a fatigued, sleep-deprived condition, which is the result of long hours on the road combined with inadequate rest and sleep.


2. Is driver fatigue a safety problem in the motor carrier industry?

Yes. Fatigue has been a major factor in truck crashes for many years. Major studies by the National Transportation Safety Board, Australian researchers, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the AAA Foundation, as well as surveys of drivers themselves, clearly indicated that the contribution of fatigue to commercial vehicle crashes and fatal truck crashes is far greater than claimed by the government and industry.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) performed a new analysis of data for the proposed hours of service rule and found that fatigue directly contributes to about 15 percent of all fatal truck crash deaths and serious injuries each year. This means that more than 750 people die and nearly 20 thousand are seriously injured on our roads and streets each year due directly to fatigued drivers of medium and heavy commercial vehicles.


3. What is "fatigue"?

Fatigue is a complex, but very real, interaction of physiological, cognitive, and emotional factors which result in slowed reactions, poor judgment, reduced cognitive processing of information, and an inability to continue performing a task or to carry it out at a high, sustained level of accuracy or safety.

The most advanced state of fatigue is, of course, literally falling asleep. This is a serious safety issue because many catastrophic failures, including motor vehicle and railroad crashes, and other shift work tragedies (e.g., Three-Mile Island), often result from fatigued workers who literally fall asleep at the controls. However, most fatigue-related human errors resulting in serious, adverse health and safety consequences occur due to degraded performance before a person actually falls asleep "at the switch." The pervasive problem of fatigue is due principally to one or more conditions including: lack of sleep; poor quality sleep (sleep that is shallow rather than deep); interrupted sleep (which denies opportunities for protracted deep sleeping periods); non-circadian or inverted circadian work and rest cycles (that is, on other than a regular 24-hour schedule, or working at night and trying to sleep during the day); rapidly rotating work/rest cycles (which undermines partial adaptation to changed work/sleep schedules); physical exhaustion (which can result from hours of loading and unloading heavy freight); organic diseases (such as sleep apnea, narcolepsy, and severe diabetes); and the excessive use of and reliance upon both stimulants and depressants to compensate for insufficiently long or poor quality sleep.


4. Is the public concerned about increasing the hours of service for truck drivers?

Public opinion polls conducted in the past three years show that Americans have serious concerns about truck safety in general on our highways and the issue of truck driver fatigue in particular. In 1997, the Insurance Research Council asked the public if truckers should be allowed to drive longer hours in one stretch and if truckers should be allowed to drive longer hours over an eight-day period. In both instances, over 80 percent of the respondents said that truck drivers should not be allowed to drive longer hours. In 1998, Louis Harris conducted a poll for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety (Advocates) in which 81 percent of the public said they feel that fatigued truck drivers are a very serious safety problem or somewhat of a serious safety problem. A survey conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation for the Consumer Federation of America and Advocates revealed that an overwhelming 93 percent of the American public think that driving longer hours is less safe than driving fewer hours. The public clearly recognizes the link between more driving hours, fatigue and highway safety.


5. What is the current hours of service (HOS) rule?

The current HOS rule was adopted at the end of the 1930s, largely as a product of the trucking industry exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requiring overtime pay. In 1962 it was amended by the now-defunct Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). The current rule requires that commercial drivers:

· operate a truck or bus in interstate commerce no more than 10 consecutive hours before taking a minimum 8 hours of off-duty rest time which may be split into two unequal periods in a truck sleeper berth;

· be on-duty no more than 15 total hours in any 24-hour period, of which no more than 10 hours may be spent driving; and,

· drive no more than 60 hours in any 7-day period or more than 70 hours in any 8-day period.

The important feature of the current HOS rule is that it permits commercial truckers alternately to drive a maximum of 10 hours straight and to rest for a minimum of 8 hours until reaching 60 hours of driving in seven days or 70 hours of driving in eight days. This permits as much as 16 hours of driving in any 24-hour period on an 18-hour drive/rest schedule.

This schedule means that drivers can drive or try to rest at the same time that they were doing the opposite just the day before. Combined with the possibility of driving 16 hours in any 24-hour period, this constant 18-hour shift rotation is a major reason for driver fatigue, especially among long-haul drivers. The current rule also leads to many other abuses mentioned below.


6. Why does the HOS rule need to be changed?

Promotes Fatigue - The current rule actually encourages sleep-deprived, overworked truck drivers whose level of alertness and resulting poor driving performance behind the wheel becomes dangerous both to themselves and others who share the roads with large trucks. Without reform of the HOS rule, fatigued, sleep-deprived commercial drivers will continue to be a direct cause of hundreds of highway deaths and tens of thousands of serious injuries in motor vehicle crashes each year.

Increased Crash Risk Exposure - The rule encourages excessively long driving and duty times in a 24-hour period, and inadequate time for sleep, recreation, and normal activities, including family life.

Unrealistic Driving Schedules and High Violation Rates - The rule encourages carriers, shippers, and consignees (receivers) to set delivery schedules which can only be met by violations of driving time, total duty time, and minimum rest time requirements, combined with speeding, which drivers attempt to conceal by falsifying their Record of Duty (paper) logbooks.

Poor Enforcement - The ability of many hundreds of thousands of commercial drivers to regularly conceal HOS violations by manipulating entries in their Record of Duty logbooks and the difficulty of detecting and verifying these violations has undermined effective enforcement of the rule.


7. What features of the new proposed HOS rule can improve truck driver and highway safety?

· Circadian (24-Hour) Clock - The proposed rule requires that work and rest alternate only within a 24-hour period, that is, it eliminates the abuse of the current rule which allows drivers to work/drive and rest on an 18-hour "clock." These rotating schedules of work and rest, which are less than a 24-hour period, are recognized by the FMCSA as very dangerous to commercial driver safety.

· Limited Weekly Work Time - In general, the proposed rule limits total work time for most drivers to 60 hours each week, but there are exceptions.

· Generally Longer Daily Off-Duty Rest Periods - In general, drivers must take between 9 to 12 continuous off-duty hours each workday as a single block of time for rest and sleep.

· Prohibition On Interruption of Continuous Off-Duty Rest Time - The proposed rule provides that any interruption of the continuous block of off-duty rest time by dispatchers, shippers, or consignees requires re-starting the full length of the off-duty period.

· Prohibition of Splitting Off-Duty Rest Time In Sleeper Berths - Recognizing that split sleep berth rest time results in shorter and poorer quality sleep, the proposed rule no longer allows drivers to split their daily off-duty rest time in sleeper berths. The entire off-duty rest period must be taken as a single, unbroken block of time even in a sleeper berth. Only team drivers are exempted and may split their rest period into two segments.

· Required Breaks Added to Daily Off-Duty Time - The proposed rule requires that commercial drivers, depending on which category they fall in, take up to 2 to 3 hours of breaks in addition to a minimum, continuous off-duty period. Although short breaks have not been shown to restore full worker performance and safety, these breaks for most drivers also can be added to the minimum continuous off-duty period so that there are substantial opportunities for sufficient, protracted sleep.

· Weekly Off-Duty Layover Which Includes Consecutive Nights for Recovery Sleep - A weekly, continuous off-duty period encompassing at least two successive nights is required for all types of drivers following accrual of maximum work hours.

· Required Use of Electronic On-Board Recorders (EOBRs) By Some Types of Drivers To Verify Driving Time - The proposal requires Type 1 (long-haul) and Type 2 (regional) drivers to use tamper-proof EOBRs which monitor actual driving time per day and per week. These devices will help to limit violations of maximum driving hours and their data are available immediately to enforcement authorities.


8. What features of the new HOS proposed rule would harm truck drivers and highway safety?

· Longer Driving Hours - The rule permits truck drivers, especially drivers in long-haul (Type 1) operations, to operate their rigs for 12 consecutive hours, 2 hours longer than permitted under the current rule. This increases the exposure time of commercial drivers to the risk of crashes, especially when they are close to the maximum permitted driving time, the point at which they are the most fatigued.

· Increased Risk of Crashes - Commercial drivers and other shift workers have been shown in more than 30 years of research to suffer from lowered alertness, poorer performance, and an increase in errors and risk of deaths and injuries from longer consecutive working hours. Workers putting in very long hours also suffer from more serious health problems. They experience, among other things, both acute and chronic lack of sleep because very long working hours directly affect the ability of workers to achieve sufficient high-quality restorative sleep, even when there is available time to get enough sleep.

· Inadequate Weekly Time for Sleep - The proposed rule allows for only a minimum of 32 hours off-duty after 5 or even 6 days of driving and working 12 or 13 continuous hours per day amounting to 60, 72, or even 78 hours of total work and driving time for one class of driver. In fact, very recent research conducted for the Canadian government as well as an investigation carried out by the FMCSA's principal author of its Driver Fatigue and Alertness Study (1997) casts direct doubt on the ability of drivers to recover from 60 to 78 hours of work and driving over the previous week with only 32 hours off-duty.

· Inadequate Daily Time for Sleep - Some types of drivers in local-split shift and work vehicle operations (Types 3 and 5) can be restricted to as little as 9 continuous hours off-duty before being required to work or drive again for another 13 hours. A 9-hour off-duty period comes close to the current minimum 8 hours off-duty period, which has been proven inadequate to permit enough time to ensure necessary sleep, recreation, and attention to personal responsibilities.

· Long Monthly and Yearly Driving/Working Hours - Although the proposed rule repeatedly defines the "work week" as a 7-day on-duty/off-duty rotation, the schedules offered by the FMCSA in the draft regulation actually allow a 6.3 day on-duty/off-duty rotation which, for some drivers, could result in nearly 300 work/driving hours in a month or nearly 3,600 hours a year -- over 50 percent more than the average amount of hours accrued by workers in other economic sectors.

· More Demanding Weekly Driving Schedules With Inadequate Off-duty Time - The proposed rule permits some drivers to work and drive a sixth day in a row, but provides no more of an off-duty period Ð a minimum 32 hours Ð for sleep and recovery after 6 days of work and driving than drivers operating for 5 consecutive days.

· Unrestricted Nighttime Driving - The proposal also permits unlimited nighttime driving which, in some cases, will reinforce certain sectors of the trucking industry to displace even more driving to nighttime hours in order to meet time-sensitive or "just-in-time" delivery schedules. Nighttime driving by commercial vehicle operators has been shown in a wide range of studies to result in an elevated risk for crashes between 4 and more than 20 times the risk associated with daytime driving.

· No Additional Daily or Weekly Rest for Nighttime Driving - The proposal allows nighttime driving to continue without restrictions but provides no more of an off-duty rest period per day and per week than provided for solely daytime drivers.

· Failure to Provide Non-Driving Duty Time Each Day Promotes Violations - The proposed rule makes no distinction between driving and non-driving time. The combination of a circadian cycle with reduced total daily duty hours (12 hours in each 24 hours), compared with the present rule (15 hours in each 24 hours), may result in some drivers driving the maximum possible hours per day, but then spending several hours at other truck work (for example, loading and unloading freight or waiting for a shipment) during their daily, mandated off-duty rest time. Neither EOBRs nor Department of Labor time cards can reveal these violations.

· Complicated Definitions of Different Kinds of Drivers Undermines Enforcement - The division of drivers into 5 different types with different lengths of working hours, off-duty rest hours, and amounts of "break" time, combined with the agency's admission that drivers can change their category virtually on a daily basis, undermines effective enforcement. In fact, the national enforcement community has said that, in its current form, the rule would be almost impossible to enforce.

· Elimination of Record of Duty Logbooks - Paper logbooks are eliminated for all types of drivers and Department of Labor time cards do not have to be on board any vehicle, including those operated by local-split shift, local, and work vehicle drivers (Types 3-5) for whom EOBRs are not required. This will make enforcement of HOS rules extremely difficult for law enforcement officers.


9. What are the major reforms of the HOS rule that the safety community thinks are necessary?

· Specific Driving Time Limits - The proposed rule allows all of the 12 consecutive hours of work time per day for the drivers in long haul and regional operations to be spent in driving. This is simply too long a protracted period of continuous driving. Numerous studies, most of them not yet reviewed or misrepresented by the FMCSA in the preamble of the new rulemaking proposal, show that driving or working more than the 10 consecutive hours permitted under the current HOS rule dramatically increases the risk of a crash for a commercial driver. Consecutive driving time should be limited, at most, to the current 10 hours maximum.

· Distinguish Between Driving and Non-Driving Duty Time - The failure of the proposed rule to distinguish between driving and non-driving time on duty encourages many commercial drivers to spend as much time as possible driving during the 12 hours per day allowed by the proposal and then perform the additional duties involving waiting or freight handling during their off-duty rest time. This will result in widespread violations and drivers who will frequently still achieve inadequate amounts of sleep each day. The FMCSA must instead clearly allow duty time for non-driving responsibilities. As an incentive to the industry to control the large amounts of time currently wasted by drivers waiting for loads and to encourage the reform of shipper and consignees practices forcing drivers to load and unload freight as well as to transport it, the FMCSA should establish a 12-hour daily total duty period of which no more than 10 hours may be spent driving, with 2 hours reserved for non-driving work.

· Require Electronic On-Board Recorders for More Driver Types or Kinds of Motor Carrier Operations - Safety advocates cannot support restriction of EOBRs to only long-haul and regional drivers (Types 1 and 2) because many other sectors of the trucking industry have drivers which regularly exceed HOS driving limits, take inadequate rest time, and falsify their logbooks to attempt to show compliance. Pickup and delivery operations, for example, often exceed total duty hours which, combined with substantial driving time and inadequate rest, present a significant threat to highway safety. With the proposed deletion by the FMCSA of paper logbooks in the draft regulation and the use of Department of Labor time cards which do not have to be on board any vehicle at the time when a driver or his equipment is subject to enforcement inspection, no effective oversight and control of daily and weekly driving, duty, and rest time is possible under the FMCSA proposal. Although EOBRs cannot verify all time spent in work-related duties or the driver's activities during an off-duty rest period, they are a major addition to the enforcement arsenal of police and motor carrier inspectors to determine whether drivers have adhered to maximum work time per day and per week, and to minimum daily and weekly off-duty time.


10. Are the electronic on-board recorders required by the proposed HOS rule too expensive?

Not at all. A large portion of the currently extensive problem of violations of the HOS requirements consists of driving in excess of the maximum permitted hours. EOBRs are important contributors to strengthening federal and state oversight and enforcement of HOS limits. Although EOBRs cannot directly monitor how a driver actually spends his or her off-duty time, they can control the time windows in which actual driving occurs so that truck and bus operators do not exceed safe limits of time spent behind the wheel.

As for the expenses of buying, installing, and maintaining EOBRs, the FMCSA's benefit/cost analysis estimates the cost per unit in the range of $1000 per truck. However, the agency believes that the cost per unit to own and maintain EOBRs will be significantly less than this amount; especially after economies of scale both in the costs of production and in the marketplace take hold after a compliance schedule is triggered by the adoption of a final rule. Moreover, recent information by a major manufacturer provided at the first public hearing on the proposed rule conducted by the FMCSA has indicated that equipment meeting the precise purpose and intent of the proposed rule's requirements for the data captured by EOBRs is available at a price of $300 per unit.


11. Is it true that the proposed rule could increase the number of trucks and drivers on the road, and cause more congestion for daytime traffic?

No. There are several reasons why these claims divert attention from understanding the benefits of more stringent hours of service requirements which will do a far better job of protecting everyone's safety on our roads and streets, truck drivers and motorists alike.

First, there is no need to have more trucks on the road at any given time because, with shorter work hours per day and a 24-hour work/rest cycle controlling truck driving, many trucks and drivers will be off-duty during the time other trucks are pressed into service to meet delivery schedules. In other words, not only is there no total increase in risk exposure for the trucking community, but, in fact, shorter work hours per day along with other positive features of even the version of the HOS rule proposed by the FMCSA will help reduce some aspects of high risk exposure.

Second, displacing some truck driving from nighttime to daytime hours would tremendously benefit safety, contrary to claims by the industry that this will cause more crashes. Nighttime driving for truck drivers is exceptionally dangerous, as proven by crash figures of long standing about the multiplied level of risk associated with driving at night when our biological clocks are telling us to stop working and sleep.

Third, the displacement of some trucks to daytime driving, would amount at best to several thousand trucks in a total vehicle population of over 200 million cars, light trucks and vans, buses, and medium and heavy trucks. Hence, the overall impact of these additions, if they occurred, would be virtually immeasurable in terms of congestion, for example, but could actually yield an overall safety benefit because of a reduction in nighttime driving.

Finally, the claim about more drivers, trucks, and daytime driving is based upon a very high level of inefficiency built into current motor carrier operations in major sectors of the industry. Any increase in daytime activity could be easily offset by modest improvements in the efficient use of existing vehicles and drivers.

As pointed out by Professor Michael Belzer of the University of Michigan in his analysis of trucking operations, even long-haul drivers spend a surprisingly large percentage of their time simply waiting for loads -- 23 percent of their total work time, in fact. This waiting time is a tremendous economic inefficiency for the industry and redounds to the detriment of both the costs of conducting motor carrier operations as well as of the costs of goods to wholesalers, distributors, retailers, and, finally, to consumers. (Not incidentally, this waiting time also harms highway safety because drivers often falsify their logbooks to conceal time spent waiting for loads during their off-duty rest time.) As Belzer stresses, these inefficiencies are not lost economic opportunity costs for the shippers, brokers, and consignees. In the language of economics, these are economic externalities, that is, costs borne not by them, but by others. However, if HOS rules for safety benefits compelled changes in industry operations which directly challenge and overcome this enormous loss of productive time, most of these unnecessary costs could be avoided and the need for extra trucks and drivers to deliver freight in a timely manner could probably be avoided entirely.