With a variety of hours of service revision options on the table in the wake of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking soliciting input from truckers and others — and the listening session regulators held at the Great American Trucking Show — everybody’s favorite subject of debate has engendered plenty among Overdrive‘s mostly owner-operator readers.
Commentary has been bookended on one side by the careful-what-you-wish-for set, including RC‘s cynical “big dreams” under James Jaillet’s report from the GATS listening session — “Get rid of HOS. No logs, no ELDs. Don’t need one in my pickup, why do I need any of it in my big truck? If I’m gonna fantasize, might as well dream big. I’m sure they will make changes that will make things worse.”
On the hopeful side, with no shortage of realism thrown in, was MrBigRigR504: “Drop the 30-minute break. Split the sleeper berth. [Add a] three-hour clock pause once a week…. Cool! Y’all keep in mind that shippers/receivers are watching and waiting to exploit any way they can to hold you with no detention pay and mess up your clock, then kick you off their property! And the rates will drop, also. HOS flexibility is one thing, but don’t make it easy for them to exploit our wiggle room and cut the rates! I’m just saying.”
The commenter’s proposal in a certain way splits (pun intended) the difference between two petitions that the FMCSA is considering around potential hours of service changes — the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s request for an at-least three-hour off-duty pause to the 14-hour clock that could be exercised when needed — and the Trucker Nation petition around liberalizing sleeper-berth splits, an option FMCSA has long been seeking to study.
Other commenters, however, such as Clinton Seals, pointed toward other ways to allow for some flexibility for owner-ops without giving rein to those who would abuse drivers’ time. Seals pointed back to a prior suggestion of a 16-hour window for completing a 14-hour duty day. “I feel this would eliminate a lot of our problems out here,” he said, offering what would amount to a daily possible two-hours’ worth of off-duty flex time for the 14-hour clock.
Butch McTavish favored a 16-hour on-duty window for the 11, and a required 8 hours off that could be run with splits “however you need to get rest and get the job done.” And Rick Schultz urged regulators to consider reverting to rules in place before the addition of the 14-hour window, including “unlimited use of split sleeper … however we see fit.”
Pat Hockaday, nonetheless, joined voices cautioning against allowing too much in the way of potential productivity with an eye on “the money,” as he called it. “We Drivers are honorable people for the most part. We could live with the HOS just as they are if only we could afford to operate in compliance! Are the LTL drivers crying for more ability to flood the market with capacity to lower their value? Don’t they drive for a living just as we? More is never enough for us, because we lower our value, making us need more.”
