Carrier group joins lawsuit over HOS rules
The Truckload Carriers Association (TCA) has joined the California and Ohio Trucking Associations and the Teamsters Union in filing a motion to intervene in the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) lawsuit involving new hours-of-service regulations.
The TCA motion, filed Feb 22, 2006, asks the court to allow arguments relative to the permissible on-duty and mandatory off-duty requirements for both single and team drivers using a vehicle equipped with a sleeper berth.
In August 2005, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) denied OOIDA’s request for two changes to the current HOS regulations, prompting the lawsuit.
An involved split sleeper-berth provision for team drivers is sought by OOIDA. Under current HOS regulations, team drivers have to take off a minimum of eight consecutive hours in the sleeper berth. So one driver is virtually imprisoned in the sleeper berth, and the other driver is pressured to drive at least eight hours in one stretch while the other driver is off duty, OOIDA said.
Current regulations say that if a trucker chooses to split up the required 10 hours of off-duty time, one of the two periods must be at least eight hours. That eight-hour rest period stops the 14-hour maximum on-duty clock. The other two off-duty hours can be taken another time, either in the sleeper or out, to fulfill the 10-hour off-duty requirement, but they do not stop the 14-hour clock, OOIDA said. The association asks that those two hours would stop the clock and that the driver could take those off-duty and not count against his working time.
