FMCSA announced Tuesday that it will completely rewrite the 2008 HOS regulations that are currently in effect. FMCSA officials said the agency will issue a notice of proposed rulemaking within nine months and a final rule in less than two years. The agency will continue to enforce the current HOS rules until the new regulation takes effect.
The American Trucking Associations (ATA) said the HOS regulations, as they are currently constructed, are good safety rules. ATA believes they are working, and the proof is in the industry’s safety performance since they took effect in 2004.
“Safety in the trucking industry has greatly improved while operating under the current hours-of-service rules,” said ATA President and CEO Bill Graves. “Over the past five years we’ve seen a strong decline in truck-involved crashes on our nation’s highways.”
Figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) clearly demonstrate that the trucking industry is now the safest it has been since the DOT began keeping crash statistics in 1975. The number of truck-involved fatalities on our highways has decreased by 19 percent since the new HOS rules took effect. The number of injuries has decreased by 13 percent since 2004. These substantial safety improvements came at a time when the number of registered large trucks operating on our highways increased by hundreds of thousands of trucks and the number of miles driven by large trucks increased by more than 2 billion miles.