Truckers don’t want the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to change the 11-hour daily driving rule, reports TheTrucker.com, citing the results of its unscientific poll.
Drivers who responded voted an overwhelm 69.8 percent against changing the ruling, which restricts them to driving 11 hours each day. Previous regulations limited drivers to a 10-hour driving day. Only 31.2 percent of responding truckers voted to restore the 10-hour rule.
As for the 34-hour ‘reset’ rule, 73.7 percent of voting drivers said they wanted to keep the regulation, while 26.3 voted to eliminate the rule. Thetrucker.com reported 450 participants in the opinion poll.
The regulations are back on the table following a settlement of the third lawsuit Public Citizen et. al., brought against the HOS rule. The Oct. 26 settlement requires that the FMCSA must issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking within 9 months, and that a new Final Rule be issued within 21 months.
According to the American Trucking Association (ATA), “the rates of truck-involved fatal crashes and injuries have declined every year since the current HOS regulations went into effect” in 2004. Critics of the rule-change, including the Public Citizen group, have brought three suits trying to reduce the drive time allowance and eliminate the 34-hour reset rule, claiming the added hour of driving and reset would cause more trucker-fatigue related accidents.
Not so, says ATA in a March 10 response to the critics. Over the 5-years since the HOS changes, “the significant increase in truck crashes and fatalities that one would have anticipated, based on Petitioner’s criticism, has simply failed to occur,” the organization reported at that time, citing a fatality rate involving large trucks at “the lowest level since records have been kept.”
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these busy bodys have too much time on theyre hands so they keep changing things for amusement and bribes