New Truckers Rule No Real Help Says AIA

By Daniel Hays

NU Online News Service, April 25, 10:22 a.m. EST?A federal rule announced yesterday that sets new limits on how long a shift a trucker can work behind the wheel will not really improve safety, an insurance trade group said.

The American Insurance Association in Washington voiced the complaint, saying it had urged officials of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Agency to allow truckers no more than nine consecutive hours of driving at a stretch.

Dave Snyder, AIA vice president and assistant general counsel, said under the old regulatory arrangement a trucker could drive for 10 hours after an eight-hour rest period and in some circumstances for 16 hours.

Under the new regulation, the off duty requirement has been expanded to 10 hours, while the driving time has been increased to 11 hours.

More rest, Mr. Snyder said was good news, but the agency had ignored research that showed after driving more than eight or nine hours, "the risk goes up dramatically."

Also questioning the new rule was the National Association of Independent Insurers.

David Golden, NAII director of commercial lines, said while the Des Plaines, Ill.-based NAII supports the 10-hour rest period as a beginning move to address safety issues it has "lingering concerns" that FMCSA still has not put drivers on a 24-hour basis for scheduling.

Twenty-four hour scheduling is a concept NAII supports "because numerous studies have shown that drivers maintain their alertness much better when working in a natural circadian rhythm," Mr. Golden said. NAII said it would have more reaction after studying all 68-pages of the new rules.

Mr. Snyder said the FMCSA had ignored AIA's recommendation that onboard recorders be placed on all trucks to monitor driving time rather than relying on numbers put down in logs by truckers that are frequently falsified.

Under the new FMCSA plan, drivers may not drive past the 14th hour of being on duty. Also, they may not drive after being on duty for 60 hours in a seven- consecutive-day period.

Today's rule change is the first significant change to the hours-of-service rules since 1939.

Mr. Snyder said that studies have shown that fatigue is a factor in the majority of truck crashes.

According to AIA, truck crashes each year claim nearly 5,000 lives, injure hundreds of thousands of people, and cost billions of dollars for medical care, property damage and lost productivity.

AIA noted these crashes most often injure or kill the occupants of the other vehicles involved, and when hazardous materials are involved, such crashes can constitute a large-scale disaster.

For years, individual insurance companies, AIA and other world-class safety experts, such as the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, have formally and repeatedly petitioned regulators to require onboard data recorders to make sure that whatever rules are on the books actually are enforced, AIA said in a statement.

The group said use of onboard recorders is a simple, cheap and effective monitoring system--"yet rather than mandate recorders' use, the new rule only calls for further study of such devices."

FMCSA estimates that the new rule will save 75 lives and prevent 1,320 crashes annually. "Even accepting that estimate," said Mr. Snyder, "it's far less than the human and financial costs that could have been saved with a stronger rule."

"Because of its contents and lack of effective enforcement, we believe the new rules are unlikely to help achieve the Department of Transportation's self-imposed objective of reducing truck crash fatalities by 50 percent in the near future. Unfortunately, this was a tremendous opportunity lost."

Other details of the final rule can be found at http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov.

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New Truckers Rule No Real Help Says AIA

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