WASHINGTON, D.C. — The American Trucking Associations (ATA) filed a brief with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that proposed hours-of-service changes will prove costly.

The association said the HoS rules, as proposed, will add tremendous cost to the economy and undue burden on drivers while providing minimal possible safety benefits.

“From the outset of FMCSA’s review of the hours-of-service rule, ATA has contended that the rules that have been in place since 2004 have been working and have been a major contributing factor in the reduction in truck-involved crashes and fatalities,” ATA president and CEO Bill Graves said. “FMCSA systematically, and without regard for science or logic, distorted the available data in order to fit it to a predetermined and arbitrary outcome. The brief filed today lays out this case convincingly and we believe the court will come to see the merits of our case and vacate these potentially ruinous changes.”

The ATA said the changes are “arbitrary and capricious as well as unwarranted.”

“The agency claims that restart restrictions and the off-duty break requirement are justified by the cost-benefit analysis in FMCSA’s Regulatory Impact Analysis. That ‘analysis,’ however, is a sham,” the brief said. “FMCSA stacked the deck in favor of its preferred outcome by basing its cost-benefit calculations on a host of transparently unjustifiable assumptions. FMCSA therefore cannot justify the 2011 final rule on the ground that it has net benefits.”

The full brief can be downloaded here.