ARLINGTON, Va. — The American Trucking Associations (ATA) has filed motion calling on the US Court of Appeals to provide an eight-month stay of its mandate to eliminate the 11-hour daily driving limit and 34-hour restart provisions of the US HoS rules.

A July 24 court decision found that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) did not follow proper procedure when passing the two rules into law. FMCSA must justify its decision or the rules may be permanently overturned.

“The trucking industry and its customers could not instantaneously shift to an hours-of-service regime with a different daily driving limit and without the 34-hour restart. Rather, such a conversion would require months of preparation,” the ATA’s motion said.

The ATA expressed concerns that carriers would have to re-train drivers and operations personnel, re-print logs and forms, update recording software and compensate for lost productivity.

Meanwhile, the lobby group says that eliminating the two provisions in question will wipe out the only provisions that help offset productivity losses incurred under other parts of the HoS regulations (such as the increase in mandatory off-duty time and the decrease of the maximum on-duty time).

ATA hopes that an eight-month stay will provide FMCSA with enough time to properly prove the reasoning behind the controversial provisions.