ATA Thanks Congress for HOS Remedy in Omnibus

The American Trucking Associations (ATA) has officially thanked Congress – particularly Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) – for what the organization called a “common sense fix to two unjustified provisions of the current hours-of-service restart rules in this year’s omnibus spending bill.”

“We have known since the beginning that the federal government did not properly evaluate the potential impacts of the changes it made in July 2013,” said ATA President and CEO Bill Graves. Suspending these restrictions until all the proper research can be done is a reasonable step.”

The Collins Amendment language, which was adopted by a strong bipartisan vote of the Senate Appropriations Committee, suspends the restriction on the use of the so-called 34-hour restart that requires drivers to take two consecutive periods of 1am to 5am off during the restart, thus pushing them into riskier daytime driving and then lifts the restriction on using the restart more than once every 168 hours, or one week.

“One of our members told us several of his drivers took four days off for the recent Thanksgiving holiday, yet when they returned to work, their hours were limited because that 96-hour break could not count as a 34-hour restart,” Graves said.

“Fleets from around the country, including mine, tried to tell FMCSA that the previous rules were working just fine and that these new restart provisions were going to cause unintended problems,” said ATA Chairman Duane Long, chairman of Longistics, Raleigh, N.C.

Tags: HOS

Category: Featured, General Update, Management