CCJ Symposium regulatory panel: FMCSA rep defends regulations, offers update on rulemakings; TCA’s Heller calls for more sensible regs

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Updated May 20, 2015
TCA’s David Heller, left, and FMCSA’s Jack Van Steenburg, right, talked a bevy of trucking regulations at CCJ’s Spring Symposium May 19. CCJ Editor Jeff Crissey, center, moderated a question and answer session.TCA’s David Heller, left, and FMCSA’s Jack Van Steenburg, right, talked a bevy of trucking regulations at CCJ’s Spring Symposium May 19. CCJ Editor Jeff Crissey, center, moderated a question and answer session.

The Chief Safety Officer for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration defended Tuesday May 19 his agency’s expansive CSA safety program and the data behind it, while the Truckload Carriers Association’s David Heller toed the trucking industry’s line that the program skews carrier safety data and needs reworked.

Jack Van Steenburg, FMCSA’s CSO, and Heller, TCA’s head of policy, shared the stage Tuesday at CCJ’s Spring Symposium in Birmingham, Ala., in an hour-long discussion that spanned nearly all regulations impacting carriers and the trucking industry presently.

While CSA was a hot topic, the two also talked hours-of-service regulations, speed limiters, electronic logging devices, detention, entry-level driver training, driver drug testing and driver coercion.

Steenburg told carrier rep attendees that CSA’s BASICs (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories) do allow the agency to target carriers most at risk for crashes. “Our data is accurate,” Steenburg said. “I challenge anybody to say the data is inaccurate. We disagree with the [2014] GAO report.”

Heller, however, pointed to the CSA rankings’ use by third parties, such as litigators and shippers, to either deny carriers business or sue. “CSA went into the board room,” Heller said, pointing to that as one of the program’s successes.

“However, it’s inaccurate. The GAO said it does not produce an accurate or precise safety assessment for a carrier. We just want to be judged accurately. Give us that score,” Heller said. “Because, again, who’s viewing the scores? Shippers, plaintiff attorneys and the press — all will spew out negative reports of this industry.”

Heller also encouraged fleets and drivers to get involved in FMCSA’s hours-of-service restart study (restartstudy.com) under way now. Echoing his comments last week from TCA’s Safety and Security meeting held in Charlotte, Heller said more than 28,000 comments were submitted for the last hours-of-service rewrite in 2011 for the 2013-implemented rules.

The industry needs to carry that momentum into the current study on 34-hour restart provisions, Heller said, by participating in the study. “Direct [your drivers] to get involved,” Heller said. “So we do get good sound data,” rather than relying on anecdotes to argue the industry’s stance, he said.

The five-month study, required by Congress in the 2015 government funding bill signed into law in December, will be “very objective,” Van Steenburg told attendees. “We have no foregone conclusions. We’ll be collecting data for the next five months, and we’ll compile that data and issue a report.”

Reimplementation of the 2013 rules suspended by the same funding bill will hinge on the report’s conclusions.

Heller said no matter the outcome of the study, the agency needs to find rules that “(a) make us safe and (b) make us profitable.”

“We’ve been operating under hours-of-service regulations that have changed five or six times in the last how many years?” Heller asked. “What the industry wants is a rule that makes sense and a rule that we can efficiently operate under.”

Van Steenburg also said the agency is planning a comprehensive study on the year and a half the 2013 HOS rules were in effect in an attempt to measure crash instances per miles traveled.

The agency, he says, questions the metholodogy of a recent report from the American Transportation Research Institute that concluded that, under the 2013 rules, heavy truck crashes increased. ATRI, he said, “didn’t get into vehicle miles traveled, didn’t get into time of day and didn’t get into cause,” he said.

Other regulations covered during the discussion were:

Safety Fitness Determination: The proposed rule, now projected to be published in September, would produce absolute scores for carriers as part of CSA in addition to the percentile rankings in CSA’s Safety Measurement System.

FMCSA has set the intervention threshold “very, very high” for the SFD scores, Van Steenburg said, somewhere around the 97th or 98th percentile, if it were measured that way, he said.

The rule also includes an adjudication process similar to CSA’s already exisiting DataQs system. The rule is currently under review by the Office of the Secretary of Transportation, he said. “Hopefully it will go on to the OMB very, very soon,” he said.

Electronic logging devices: Heller said an ELD mandate is something the industry “needed yesterday.” Carriers who have not already started testing e-logs are lagging behind. “If you haven’t adopted them yet, you should,” he said.

A rule to mandate use of ELDs is scheduled to be published in September, with the effective date of the rule coming two years behind its publication.

Entry-level driver training: The key question surrounding an ELDT rule, Heller said, is competency vs. hours-based training. “Would you prefer a pilot who had been in a classroom or behind the stick of a plane for a certain amount of hours or a pilot who’s competent enough to fly the plane?” Heller asked. “I’ll take competency. Well, what defines that? What defines a competent truck driver who’s going to get behind the wheel of your truck?”

“Would you prefer a pilot who had been in a classroom or behind the stick of a plane for a certain amount of hours or a pilot who’s competent enough to fly the plane?” Heller asked. “I’ll take competency. Well, what defines that? What defines a competent truck driver who’s going to get behind the wheel of your truck?”
— David Heller, TCA’s head of policy

And that’s currently the sticking point with the 26-member panel of industry stakeholders and regulators charged with producing the rule, he said. “What’s going to make it out of the room is the big question,” Heller said of the committee’s ongoing meetings.

Another key element of an ELDT rule, Heller said, is minimum driver age. “Can we get 18-year-olds into interstate trucks? All trucking associations support that,” he said. “We want them in trucking. We want to teach them to drive a truck and we want to teach them the right way.”

Either way, the industry needs minimum standards, he said, so that carriers know when they hire entry-level drivers they know what they’ve been taught and what they need to be taught.

Driver coercion, shipper accountability: The prohibition of driver coercion rule currently in the works by FMCSA would fine shippers, carriers and brokers up to $11,000 per instance of coercing or pressuring drivers to operate beyond federal regulations, such as hours-of-service rules.

Many see the rule as one that brings shippers under FMCSA’s regulatory jurisdiction, something Van Steenburg didn’t dispute when asked. “Shippers have a role in the transportation lifecycle,” he said. “They have to be held accountable. It’s very simple.”

Carriers also play a role in “managing shippers,” Van Steenburg said, and they should use any leverage they have with shippers to prevent hours-eating detention time.

Speed limiters: A proposed rule to mandate speed limiters on heavy trucks was sent from the DOT to the OMB today, May 19.

TCA is pushing for a maximum of 65 mph for trucks weighing more than 27,000 pounds, Heller said. The rule is expected to be published later this year and likely will include a specified governed speed.