Will FMCSA Hit 2015 Targets, Is DVIR Change Significant, Sleeper Berth Study

Proposed Regulatory Agenda

What’s Expected in 2015

Although they seldom hit their target, FMCSA is busy making plans for the new year. Here’s a rundown of what we might expect to happen this year:

January

Effective January 30, 2015, drivers will no longer be required to carry their medical certification. This was supposed to take effect one year ago but was delayed because many of the states weren’t ready. Will it be delayed again….we should know fairly shortly. Even once all states are on-board, drivers will still have to carry the certification for 15 days after they renew their physical to give the state motor vehicle bureau time to update the driver’s record.

March

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hopes to publish a proposed rule on heavy-duty truck speed-limiters.

April

FMCSA plans to publish a proposed rule outlining the new process for carrier safety fitness determination. This rulemaking will most likely be contentious because it will use CSA data in place of SafeStat to rate carriers as satisfactory, conditional or unsatisfactory.

September

The temporary change in the hours of service restart provision will expire at the end of September. It’s not at all likely that FMCSA will have completed the study that Congress mandated by that time so it’s quite possible that an extension will be put in place. Again, we’ll just have to see how it’s handled.

October

FMCSA expects to issue its final drug and alcohol clearinghouse rule in October.

Fall 2015

FMCSA plans to publish a final rule which will mandate the use of electronic logging devices.

DVIR Rule Relaxed

Is This A Significant Change?

FMCSA calculated that removing the requirement for a no-defect vehicle inspection report will save the industry nearly 47 million man-hours and $1.7 billion in costs. Although those statistics may be debatable, most in the industry don’t question the fact that this was a good move. However, there are some who disagree, even some in the motor carrier industry.

Most of the objections center around speculation that drivers will interpret this as an elimination of the responsibility to perform a post-trip inspection or that their inspections will become perfunctory without a mandatory check list. That type of reasoning seems to assume that FMCSA’s regulations have the ability to directly affect job performance and compliance. In the final analysis nothing has really changed.

Motor carriers are still responsible for maintaining their equipment and drivers are still responsible for inspecting and reporting defects. The effectiveness of this process has been and will continue to be determined by the motor carrier’s policies and the drivers motivation and work ethic.

Going forward each motor carrier should examine the effectiveness of their inspection and repair programs and make adjustments as necessary. They could even require a DVIR every day, even if there are no defects. The regulations don’t require that, but they do allow it.

Split Sleeper Berth Study Planned

Will Test Increased HOS Flexibility

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has announced plans to conduct a test of the safety impact of allowing more flexible sleeper berth splits. The agency hopes to award the contract for the study this month. However, the study probably won’t actually begin to collect data until January, 2016, which puts any announcement of results at least two years away.

The study will allow 200 test drivers to utilize different scenarios in the way sleeper berth time is accumulated including extending the 14 hour clock. In some ways the tested scenarios will mirror rest strategies that were allowable prior to implementation of the current HOS regulations.

Testing will take place under actual driving conditions and the driver’s performance will be tracked using on-board monitoring systems. Also, the drivers will be required to periodically perform a three-minute psycho-motor vigilance test with the results uploaded via a smart phone app.

The ultimate goal is to determine if rest period flexibility will result in reduced driver fatigue. It’s interesting to note that a prior FMCSA study found that a split sleep schedule allowed drivers to get more rest as opposed to an entirely daytime sleep schedule.

In this study, drivers who slept at night got the most rest: 8.4 hours on average. Drivers who slept during the day got the least rest: 6.4 hours on average. Drivers who slept on a schedule split between day and night averaged 7.2 hours of rest. The study concluded that a single period of nighttime sleep is the most beneficial, but if drivers are unable to adhere to that schedule, the second-best alternative is a split sleep schedule.

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