The first day of school during the pandemic came and went with little fanfare. In the greater Washington, D.C., area, the school year started virtually, in what seemed like a very unfulfilling manner. There were no school buses traveling the neighborhood, and there was very little back-to-school shopping. Instead, there was the unceremonious button pressing to turn on a laptop to begin a virtual day of classes.
My son, starting his freshman year of high school, finished last year in quite literally the same virtual manner, ending the school year by merely turning off his computer. The spring season, however, was treated much like a pilot program, acclimating the student body to what will certainly be an uneventful fall semester. The first day of school started without a hitch, but that’s because school systems across the country made the transition in the spring, in typical pilot program fashion, to make sure that they got it right in the fall.
So, what does this have to do with trucking? By the time you read this, the new Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) hours of service (HOS) regulations will already have gone into effect. Based upon data generated by the electronic logging device (ELD) rule under which our industry has been fully operating since last December, trucking has been blessed or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with the expansion of the workday for short haul operators. This is an addition to the adverse driving conditions clause, a better way to address the 30-minute break, and finally, some greater flexibility in the 14-hour workday.
That flexibility, once proposed as a pilot program that had been canceled in lieu of a fast-tracked rulemaking, incorporates a 7/3 sleeper berth split that stops the 14-hour on-duty clock while utilizing this provision. While I don’t really want to look a gift horse in the mouth, the provision could clearly have been better if the original pilot program had been utilized to ascertain whether a 6/4 or 5/5 split could have been equally beneficial. We all have the ability of hindsight being 20/20, but pilot programs are certainly not a thing of the past. As recently as the end of August, FMCSA proposed a pilot program to study the effects of pausing the 14-hour clock for three hours. This could potentially create another provision to the HOS rule, if the data proves favorable to incorporating this language.
Without a doubt, fast-tracking the HOS rule was repeatedly highlighted throughout this process. Proposed through the Federal Register a little over a year ago, and a smidge over two years since the advanced notice hit the streets, this rule has moved at the speed of light in terms of government talk for finally getting to the effective date.
The rule itself moved fast and furious through a regulatory landscape to provide the truckload community with much needed additional flexibility. The rule and its corresponding ELD data will represent an open door to furthering the flexibility mantra upon which we continue to insist. If the 7/3 split proves itself to be beneficial in terms of accident reduction, and if it does combat detention and congestion in ways we think it will, the idea for incorporating even greater flexibility must be entertained.
While we certainly will address the hiccups that may inevitably occur when a rule of this magnitude becomes effective, our industry should pay closer attention to the effect of the rule when it comes to accidents and their corresponding ratios. I have always said that the ELD itself does not represent a method that improves safety, but it does track the compliance of a rule that can actually improve the safety performance of the motor carriers that operate on our highways.
This represents the greatest difference in the split sleeper part of the rule that goes into effect at the end of September compared with the versions we operated under over a decade ago. The presence of the ELD will accurately track the compliance of each driver rather than a paper logbook whose accuracy was questioned on a daily basis. The very story that the ELD tells this time around should place our industry in a position to once again insist on a pilot program that doesn’t examine the effects of a three-hour pause but rather the benefits of incorporating full flexibility in the sleeper berth that would allow drivers to break up their day as it presents itself.
While technology as a whole creeps into our society, whether it be in trucking or the start of a school year for our nation’s students, I think we can all agree that pilot programs, coupled with that technology, can expose new benefits to old ways of doing things and make everyone’s day a little bit easier to navigate.
