As the day of reckoning nears, carriers assess the probable effects of the hours-of-service regulations and weigh options for addressing them. If the rules change customers’ behavior, some carriers may even see productivity gains.
E ight years after Congress ordered them and eight months after the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration adopted them, the new hours-of-service regulations for truck drivers finally kick in Jan. 4. After years of effort and debate, the revised hours rules don’t seem all that different from the old ones – another hour here, two more hours there, with all the current exemptions still in place. And yet, there’s one huge difference.
“It doesn’t look like too much on paper, but it’s going to be a big deal for us,” says Michael Gerdin, vice president of regional operations at Heartland Express. “When we switch from 15 non-consecutive hours to 14 consecutive hours, that means a driver’s clock starts as soon as he starts his day,” Gerdin told analysts at a BB&T Capital Markets conference on transportation and logistics in New York.
And that clock continues to run. “In the past, if a customer caused a delay at the docks, Werner and other truckload carriers just had the driver stop the clock,” said Dan Cushman, executive vice president of Werner Enterprises at the Hours of Service Productivity Summit in Atlanta. “It was the path of least resistance. We can’t take that path anymore.”
The lone mechanism for stopping the clock is the sleeper berth. While split rest is used today, it will become more critical after Jan. 4. But how the sleeper berth provision works is still unclear to many fleet managers. (See “Berth control,” page 29.)
Split rest, however, doesn’t offset all the productivity lost to expanded rest requirements and, especially, inefficiencies created by customer preferences and practices. Meanwhile, few drivers will accept a cut in take-home pay, so carriers must find them more miles or pay them more. By late November, several major carriers had announced new pay packages with per-mile increases of up to 4 cents plus accessorial pay in most cases.
But it’s not inevitable that the new rules will net out as a negative for motor carriers. Under the right conditions, trucking operations may thrive. Carriers’ ability to win greater efficiencies – or at least compensation for inefficiency – may determine whether the new rules are, for them, a major disaster, a controllable inconvenience or a significant improvement over the status quo.
