The House’s Appropriations Committee voted Tuesday, May 24, to send to the full House a Department of Transportation funding package that would permanently restore 2011 regulations pertaining to truckers’ use of a 34-hour restart.
The bill also would halt the DOT’s work on its proposed Safety Fitness Determination rulemaking and would prevent states from enforcing any state-enacted laws governing break laws for truckers.
Despite strong vocal opposition to all three major trucking measures during the committee’s meeting and an amendment brought to strike all three in one swoop, the controversial trucking-related riders made the cut.
The hours of service provisions would, if made law, revert hours of service restart rules for truckers to those in effect in December 2011. A 34-hour restart would not be required to include the two 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods and its use would not be limited to once a week. The 30-minute break requirement would still be in effect, however, and would be the lone remaining element of the hours of service changes that went into effect in July 2013.
The hours provisions do not tie the future of hours of service rules to a study currently being conducted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, as Congress has called for in previous years.
The House’s hours reform, however, sets up something of a showdown with the proposal that passed the full Senate last week. In its 2017 DOT funding bill, the Senate puts the ongoing FMCSA restart study front and center. The study’s conclusions would dictate the future of hours of service regulations, if the Senate bill prevails.
Under the Senate version, if the agency’s study determines 2011 rules regarding truckers’ 34-hour restart are better for trucker fatigue, then such rules would take effect permanently, albeit with a new 73-hour limit on the amount of hours truckers can spend on duty in a rolling seven-day period.
