OOIDA Foundation highlights limitations of FMCSA reports
In recent months, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration released reports looking at the effects on the trucking industry created by the electronic logging device mandate and the changes to the hours-of-service regulations.
According to the agency’s ELD Oversight Report, the 2017 mandate has led to an increase in compliance. Meanwhile, in the other report, FMCSA said the changes to the hours of service that took effect in 2020 “did not show a significant difference in most crash-related metrics.”
Andrew King of the OOIDA Foundation outlined some of the limitations in the reports.
Hours of service
Prompted by a 2018 petition from OOIDA, four changes to the agency’s hours of service took effect in September 2020 to provide drivers more flexibility.
- The on-duty limits for short-haul operations increased from 12 to 14 hours and from 100 air miles to 150.
- The adverse driving provision extended the driving window two hours if the driver encounters adverse driving conditions.
- In addition to splits of 10/0 and 8/2, drivers are allowed a split-sleeper option of 7/3. Also, the qualifying period doesn’t count against the 14-hour window.
- The 30-minute break provision was modified to require the break after eight hours of driving time (instead of on-duty time) and allows an on-duty/not driving period to qualify as the required break.
After the hours-of-service rule changes took effect, Congress directed FMCSA to study the effects.
According to the recently released report, those effects are largely inconclusive.
“The data do not show a significant difference in crash or fatality rates, although it is important to note that initial trends may have been confounded by the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on industry operations and FMCSA’s emergency declaration that provided HOS regulatory relief for commercial motor vehicle operations providing direct assistance in support of COVID-19 relief efforts,” the agency wrote in the report.
Some media outlets focused on the report’s findings that driver inspections with at least one hours-of-service violation increased from 7.6 to 8.5% and that inspections with at least one out-of-service violation for hours of service increased from 2.6 to 3.2%.
However, King said that both increases were less than one percentage point and that little attention was given to the number of injuries in truck and bus crashes, decreasing from 7,652 to 7,131.
“When it comes to crash trends, there was one statistically significant area of change and that was in injury crashes. They went down,” King said. “No one has highlighted that. They just highlight that there was a ‘significant increase’ in violations.”
It is worth noting that the study doesn’t know which drivers were utilizing the new hours-of-service provisions and which ones weren’t.
“You really can’t draw any conclusions from it,” King said.
ELDs
FMCSA also provided an ELD report to Congress. According to the report, only 0.77% of driver inspections yielded at least one hours-of-service violation in December 2021. That’s a decrease compared to December 2017, when 1.19% of inspections found violations.
“Increased compliance with the hours-of-service rules reduces the risks of fatigue-related crashes attributable, in whole or in part, to patterns of violations of the hours-of-service rules,” FMCSA wrote in the report.
But have ELDs actually improved safety?
FMCSA’s report won’t go that far, blaming the lack of a clear answer on unexpected variables, such as the pandemic.
Based on the number of crashes in recent years, it would be difficult to argue that ELDs have made any significant improvements to highway safety.
OOIDA has long contended that improved compliance does not necessarily equate to improved safety.
“This whole idea that if drivers are being compliant with the hours of service, then they’re not fatigued is just ludicrous,” King said. “How do you measure fatigue and how you define fatigue? It’s important. Just because you don’t have an hours-of-service violation, doesn’t mean you’re not fatigued.” LL