Driver monitoring has evolved tremendously in recent years. Some carriers still rely on reports from a 1-800 “how’s my driving” number to find out when a driver is driving poorly, but many more are putting technology to work to take advantage of near-real-time reporting on driver performance. Today’s technologies allow fleets to keep track of not only where their trucks are at any moment, but also how the trucks are being operated.
Fleets have become more interested in tracking driver behaviors, particularly in response to the new CSA enforcement program put in place last year by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
“The biggest things we are seeing a push for (from customers) is driver performance and driving habits,” said Robin Hamlin, product manager for McLeod Software. “Anything to do with driver performance such as lane changes, braking and quick starts.” Read the rest of this entry »
A survey of more than 4,000 trucking industry executives by the American Transportation Research Institute revealed the top 10 critical issues facing the North American trucking industry:
1. The economy: For the third year in a row, the state of the nation’s economy was the top concern. However, the number ranking it as their number one issue has dropped each year since reaching 51.6% in 2009, to about 31% this year.
2. Hours of Service: Federal rules governing driver hours of service climbed two positions after taking the fourth spot in 2010. Nearly half of respondents (46.5%) ranked this as the first, second or third most important issue.
3. Driver shortage: This issue is up from number five in 2010, but has a larger concentration of “high priority” and “low priority” rankings compared to other issues. Some carriers are having serious problems finding drivers, but others seem to be meeting the demand through financial and work culture strategies.
4. CSA: After debuting in the No. 2 spot in 2010, the government’s new enforcement regime retreated two spots from second to fourth this year. Nearly 30% of respondents ranked this issue first or second.
5. Fuel issues: Fuel issues ranked first in 2005 and again in 2008, but dropped to sixth in 2010. This year the issue, along with the price of fuel, has risen again.
6. Congestion: While standard peak-hour congestion is costly in terms of freight delays and fuel consumption, unexpected delays are considerably worse. While congestion did not make the top 10 list in 2009 and 2010 due to the recession, it has reemerged as a standalone issue in 2011.
7. Transportation funding: This reemerged as a standalone issue this year with continued delays in passing a highway bill.
8. Tort reform: This and related legal issues returned to the top 10 list in 2011 for the first time since 2008. The trucking industry seeks tort liability reform to ensure that punitive damage awards are reasonable and directly related to negligence.
9. Onboard truck technologies: First surfacing in 2007 as a top 10 issue, this has fluctuated among the last three positions. This includes electronic logs, speed limiters, onboard safety systems, and using technology to enhance or replace roadside safety enforcement practices.
10. Truck size and weight: This first emerged as a top issue in the 2009 survey. Increased flexibility in truck size and weight could reduce congestion and fuel consumption and help with the driver shortage.
By Deborah Lockridge, Editor in Chief
http://truckinginfo.com
http://truckinginfo.com
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The American Trucking Assns. urged the Obama administration “to live up to its promise to relieve the burden of unnecessary regulations” as it considers changes to the hours-of-service rules.
“Late last year, DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) proposed costly changes to truck drivers’ hours-of-service rules which, if finalized, would result in reduced wages for hundreds of thousands of drivers, significant administrative and efficiency costs for trucking companies, and most importantly, billions of dollars in lost productivity,” Dave Osiecki, ATA senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs, wrote in a letter to Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.
“These inefficiencies and costs would deal a serious and sustained blow to the huge ‘tangible goods’ economy that trucking supports, affecting not only shippers of freight, but ultimately consumers.”
Proposed after political pressure from outside groups, the FMCSA’s proposed rule would enact drastic changes to driver’s lifestyles and carrier operations without providing any safety benefit, Osiecki charged.
“DOT described its proposal as a means to further improve trucking’s highway safety record. Yet, FMCSA’s own regulatory impact analysis showed that the proposal’s costs outweigh any potential crash reduction benefits,” Osiecki wrote.
The current hours-of-service rules, in place since 2004, he said, have allowed for trucking to move 70% of the nation’s goods and achieve record low levels of crashes and fatalities.
“On Aug. 31, 2011, FMCSA released even more evidence demonstrating that compliance with the current HOS rules is ‘strongly correlated with crash rates.’” Osiecki wrote. “In other words, carrier compliance with the current rules is directly linked to safer trucking operations.”
Sep 9, 2011 10:25 AM, By Deborah Whistler, contributing editor
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Our Hours of Service electronic on-board recording device is the perfect solution to paper drivers’ logs. For information concerning this solution, please follow this link: https://media.ilergroup.com/assets/prsnt/geo_hours_of_service.pdf.
Every movement of the vehicle will be logged in the host application as drive time, as this device is tethered and hard-wired to the vehicle. To account for personal conveyance (i.e. using the vehicle for personal use), drivers will have a few options:
1. Driver will sign ‘off duty’ for the day, and at this time using the vehicle for personal use.
- Driver can make a remark in his logs that he is going to use the vehicle for personal conveyance using the Remark feature.
2. Driver is already off duty for the day and does not want to risk interrupting his daily reset.
- He must keep paper logs indicating he is using the vehicle at that time for Personal use. When he signs in to the electronic device should use the remark feature to enter a remark of the time he used the vehicle for personal use. This can be viewed by the dispatch person in his driver logs report.
When a driver Remarks ‘personal conveyance,’ the user in the host application can quickly delete these logs. This will not interefere with eligibility, drive, or on-duty time for the driver.
For more training materials, please visit the GPS Fleet Solutions Training Library at http://www.LoginGPS.com. Or, contact our Support Department at (877) 467-0326 option 2, or Support@4agps.com.
12/30/2011
WASHINGTON — The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration appears to be counting on the new 34-restart restriction and the required 30-minute break to offset any risk involved in maintaining the 11-hour daily driving limit.
In releasing the new rule, the agency said after carefully examining numerous studies on the relationship between work hours and health and safety both in trucking and other industries, and after reviewing the comments submitted to the by trucking industry stakeholders, that it had no choice but to keep the 11-hour rule intact.
Safety advocacy groups and the Teamsters spearheaded the effort to reduce daily driving time to 10 hours. The shorter driving day also had the support of the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. The FMCSA said less than 10 percent of those who commented on the public docket on the safety of the 11th driving hour supported reducing the permissible driving time from 11 to 10 hours.
Based on information released in the final rule, 4,633 commenters spoke specifically about driving time. The agency said in the final rule that an April 2011 study released by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that the risk of safety-critical events (SCEs), such as driver error and lane tracking deviations, rises with the hours since coming on duty.
“Although the study found some increase in risk in the 11th hour, the effect is not significant,” the agency said in the final rule. “A stronger effect is related to hours worked each day and week. Given the high cost of eliminating the 11th hour and the ambiguous data, FMCSA has decided that it does not have an adequate basis to change the driving limit.” But, the agency said, the new final rule substantially reduces the maximum weekly work time and ensures that drivers cannot work the maximum number of hours every week while being given the flexibility to do so occasionally. “Some of the safety benefits [of the new rule] and most of the health benefits derive from limiting long work hours,” the FMCSA said.
The agency said many commenters, including ATA and other trucking associations, indicated that the 11th hour is used primarily for flexibility to account for unforeseen events. It noted several large carriers submitted information on the frequency with which their drivers use the 11th hour.
“The percentages reported were 6 percent, 7 percent, 9 percent, 9.5 percent, 11 percent, and 15.26 percent,” the final rule stated. “A private carrier stated that one division uses the 11th hour 85 percent of the time, while the rest use it 10 percent of the time. Another private carrier stated that its drivers rarely reach the 11th hour.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) reported that two-thirds of the respondents to its online survey said they use it one to four times a week. Individual drivers and smaller carriers reported higher use of the 11th hour, although again it was not always possible to determine whether they were reporting the percentage of daily periods with a full 11 hours of driving or the percentage of drivers who used the 11th hour at some point over the period examined.”
Henry Jasny, vice president and general counsel for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, made a strong pitch for a shorter driving day during Congressional testimony Nov. 30.
“The reformed HOS rule will have a positive impact on safety and the economy,” Jasny said in referring to the FMCSA’s stated preference for a 10-hour driving limit when it released the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on HOS on Dec. 23, 2010. “The current HOS rule has been struck down two times by the Court of Appeals and truck driver fatigue remains a serious problem that is killing and injuring too many motorists and truck drivers.
“It is time that Congress and the Executive Branch provide the same, high level of safety that the American public and the airline industry have come to expect, and indeed realize, in the aviation industry. During this past Thanksgiving week there were no commercial airplane crashes, yet nearly an estimated 100 people died, and over 1,400 more were injured in truck crashes. Chronic worker fatigue, falling asleep on the job and threats to health and safety would never be tolerated in any other sector of the transportation industry and neither should it be tolerated in the trucking industry where thousands are killed annually.”
Despite retaining the 11-hour daily driving limit, many trucking and business organizations openly frowned on the hours-of-service(HOS) regulatory overhaul unveiled by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) yesterday. And though safety and labor groups are withholding comment on the final rules for now – slated to go into effect in July 2013 – it is expected they will also react negatively, as they sought to reduce the daily driving to 10 hours.
“Scrooge himself would gladly take second chair to the lack of Christmas spirit displayed today by federal regulators that issued unnecessarily restrictive rules on our nation’s truckers,” said Michael Campbell, executive vp and CEO for the California Trucking Assn. “The only gift these rules present is the one laid at the doorstep anti-trucking groups.”
“Collectively, the changes in this [HOS] rule will have a dramatic effect on the lives and livelihoods of small-business truckers,” said Todd Spencer executive VP for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Assn. (OOIDA). “The changes are unnecessary and unwelcome and will result in no significant safety gains.”
In particular, Bill Graves, president & CEO of the American Trucking Assns. (ATA),pointed to the “two rest period” mandate for drivers between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.as part of the 34-hour “restart” provision as a serious problem.
That requirement “will create additional and unnecessary congestion and put motorists and those professional drivers at greater risk,”he said. “The largest percentage of truck-involved crashes occurs between 6 a.m. and noon, so this change not only effectively destroys the provision of the current rule most cited by professional drivers as beneficial, but it will put more trucks on the road during the statistically riskiest time of the day.”
The National Retail Federation trade association, which represents retailers and chain restaurants, also believes the two-break change to the restart provision is a troublesome issue.
“We’re pleased that regulators have seen the wisdom of keeping the current11-hour limit, but longer overnight breaks create the potential for more big trucks to be mixing with passenger cars during congested daylight hours,” said David French, NRF’s senior vp for government relations.
“These new regulations will still drive up costs for businesses and consumers while making our highways and city streets more dangerous rather than safer,” he added. “This is a case where something that might sound good on paper doesn’t work in the real world.”
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, long opposed to the 11-hour drive time limit, are in the words of their General President James Hoffa,“reviewing the new rule, and in the coming weeks we will meet and discuss it with our allies and, if necessary, determine our next course of action.”
However, many believe that as the 11 hour drive-time limit was left in place, the Teamsters and others will no doubt file lawsuits against the new HOS regulations.
“Groups that have historically been critical of the current HOS rules won’t be happy since they will have once again failed to obtain an unjustified reduction in allowable daily driving time,” said Dan England, ATA’s chairman and chairman of refrigerated TL carrier C.R. England. “By forcing through these changes FMCSA has created a situation that will ultimately please no one … [while] both the trucking industry and consumers will suffer the impact of reduced productivity and higher costs.”
Still, others noted that it’s a positive development that the agency retained the 11-hour limit, although FMCSA itself stressed that it will“continue to conduct data analysis and research to further examine any risks associated with the 11 hours of driving time.”
“The good news is that the new rule is largely the same as the old rule,” David Kelly, former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and now president of consulting firm Storm King Strategies, told FleetOwner.
“The agency is right to continue to monitor the science around 11 hour work days, but after many years of debate, drivers need certainty so they can plan their routes,” he added. “The big question is going to be how companies utilize the different EOBR [electronic onboard recorder] technologies available to comply with the rule.”
David Heller,director of safety and policy for the Truckload Carriers Assn. (TCA) echoed Kelly’s position in that retaining the 11-hour drive-time limit “is good news,” especially as drive time changes could create enormous structural changes for the trucking industry.
“The industry is set up around 11 hours of drive time, in terms of route plans, terminal locations, etc.,” he told Fleet Owner. “Those could have all been forced to change if drive time was reduced, but that did not happen.”
Heller stressed, however, that a deeper review of the new HOS rules are required to understand the complete impact they’ll have on trucking.
However, Eric Starks, president of research firm FTR Associates, pointed out that while leaving the 11 hour drive-time limit alone did not create “catastrophic” impact on trucking, the changes to the 34-hour restart provision will definitely affect productivity.
“The [mandated] breaks in and of themselves will hit productivity, but the overall impact won’t be as much as feared,” he explained to Fleet Owner. “But we still see a decent hit on productivity in terms of how they’ve redone the reset rule.”
Starks noted that, in the end the rule change “is not a catastrophe for the industry, but it’s still going to be problematic.”
One other good part about the new rules, he stressed, is that implementation is now set for July 2013, rather than the fourth quarter of 2012 as originally projected.
“That’s far enough out to not only give the industry time to adjust but work through the lawsuits that will undoubtedly be filed over these new rules,” he said.
“If there is a positive in this rule, it is the lengthy period of time before it becomes effective,” echoed ATA’s Graves concerning the 18-month delay in the rule’s compliance date. “This will give ATA time to consider legal options.”
Dec 23, 2011 10:45 AM, By Sean Kilcarr, senior editor
http://fleetowner.com/management/news/hos-rule-widespread-negativity-1223/
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An 11th hour Congressional attempt to scuttle the Dept. of Transportation’s (DOT’s) long-awaited effort to overhaul hours-of-service (HOS) regulations for the second time in less than a decade is but the latest example of the increasing legislative pushback being directed against the department’s reform effort.
U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) introduced an amendment to the fiscal year 2012 Transportation Appropriations bill that would specifically block implementing changes to any current HOS rules, especially the preference by DOT to reduce a truck driver’s maximum daily driving time from 11 hours to 10 hours and cutting the on-duty “work day” from 14 hours to 13 hours.
Read the whole article at
Oct 21, 2011 11:23 AM, By Sean Kilcarr, senior editor
In a tersely worded statement, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) said it is delaying yet again new hours of service (HOS) rules by a month to Nov. 28 – the second time this year the agency has delayed the imposition of its proposed HOS overhaul.
FMCSA said in its statement that it “will continue to work toward publishing a final rule as quickly as possible. The parties to the settlement agreement will file their next status report with the Court on November 28, 2011.”
The agency originally pushed back the publication date of its new HOS rules package from July to October 28 this year in part to deal with growing opposition to its proposed reforms.
See more at http://fleetowner.com/regulations/fmcsa-delays-hos-rules-month-1028/