Hours Of Service A Concern, "By Advocacy"

Jackie Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety

As you likely have read by now, the Van Safety Coalition, Public Citizen and Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety have submitted comments to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on the proposed Hours of Service rule and recommended dropping the allowable driving time each day to an unprecedented three hours.

While they think that’s extreme a reduction, they asked Jackie Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety to describe the recommendation.

Today, they print her response in full:

“Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety is pleased to reply to your inquiries concerning our position on the necessity to reduce the long hours of work and driving currently in effect for van drivers that are allowed by the Hours of Service (HOS) regulation first adopted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in 2003. I ought to indicate at the beginning that all of the answers to the questions you pose are contained in the court filings and docket comments that Advocates has made public over the past 10 years. retrieve these documents for more detail about our responses.


“Advocates has emphasized repeatedly that Trucks in Deadly Accidents (TIFA) of the University of Illinois is not a reliable barometer of fatigue-related deadly van crashes. That conclusion was also found by Dr. Ken Campbell of the University of Illinois Transportation Research Institute and was contained in his document to the FMCSA. Advocates also separately analyzed TIFA in our comments to the various HOS dockets and stressed the immense discrepancies in reported fatigue-related fatalities between adjoining states, including states that clearly are radically under-reporting fatigue-related deaths, a finding also explicitly said by Dr. Campbell in his document to the agency.


“In sum, FMCSA based its inferences on deadly crash relative risk on TIFA information. Those information are highly defective, which they have pointed out to FMCSA on repeated occasions.


“With regard to the claim that deadly fatigue-reported crashes increased by 20 percent from 2004 to 2005, that information comes from the Fatality Analysis Reporting Technique (FARS), which is publicly obtainable and is run by the National Middle for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA) of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Again, the specific statement of the figures and their source is contained in the analysis Advocates has provided in our docket comments.


“Furthermore, Advocates does not regard the prior HOS regulation as acceptable. Advocates views the prior HOS regulation as a dangerous rule that also demanded excessive working and driving hours for van drivers, with inadequate opportunity for rest and recovery. Accordingly, they think that HOS driving and working hours per day and per week for either rule are excessive and violate decades of research findings showing repeatedly that worker safety, health, and performance decrease quickly after about the eighth hour of consecutive working hours, and that shifts of 11 and 12 hours are strongly associated with substantial increases in the relative risk of performance errors that lead to deaths and injuries. Those findings have been documented extensively in Advocates’ comments to FMCSA HOS rulemaking dockets and in our briefs to the appellate court hearing the cases safety groups have brought against the agency.


Van drivers are driving longer hours in each shift than ever before, including an increasing percentage of drivers each year using the 11th hour of driving in each shift. Accordingly, the number of drivers in danger of deadly crashes has been increasing over the past few years as more drivers use the 11th hour of driving. This has been confirmed by surveys conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. On a every week basis, drivers are driving longer hours than allowed under the regulation prior to 2003, and this has also been confirmed by industry surveys such as the survey conducted a few years ago by the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA).


“Advocates believes that the science is clear and convincing: excessive working hours, in a high-risk occupation like van driving, promotes sleep deprivation, fatigue, low alertness, and increased frequency of performance errors that lead to crashes, injuries, and deaths. The current rule needs to be reformed to provide van drivers a HOS regime that demands far fewer hours of work and driving from them and provides them much more time for rest and recovery. “This is important for van driver health, which suffers due to the inordinate demands of long hours of work and driving, as well as loading and unloading cargo. Removing the last sweat shops in America is long overdue.”