Hours-of-service rules are a snake pit and do little more than generate revenue for one government agency or another. Seldom can they be credited with saving lives. If a driver is foolish enough to drive until he drops, a few tiny paragraphs of legal mumbo-jumbo are not going to slow the bugger down. The regulations really affect only the honest, sensible drivers who know when to say “whoa” but still must juggle compliance issues with operational reality.

If there has ever been an exercise that illustrates the absurdity of trying to regulate human behavior, this is it.

Take the bizarre claim made by the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in announcing its mandate in April: “FMCSA estimates the new rule will save up to 75 lives and prevent as many as 1,326 fatigue-related crashes annually.” Say what?
There were 4,902 truck-related fatalities in traffic crashes in the United States in 2002. If, as the U.S. DOT’s and Transport Canada’s own findings suggest, the truck driver was at fault no more than 30 per cent of the time, then only 1,470 of those crashes could be laid on the driver’s doorstep. Further, if fatigue really was a factor in about 30 per cent of the accidents, then we’re down to about 440 fatigue-related deaths caused by truckers in all of 2002.

Not that I’m willing to write off 440 souls, but with 3.5 million American truckers each travelling around 100,000 miles a year, I’d say my estimated annual fatigue-related fatality rate of 440 is enviable. To put it into perspective, in 1999 the U.S. National Safety Council reported that 422 truckers died in the line of duty. But 624 people died falling out of bed, 594 died of exposure to excessive natural heat, and 598 succumbed to excessive natural cold.

What really galls me is that when the Americans were determining these new rules, they ultimately ignored sleep specialists who repeatedly said the only way to combat fatigue is to sleep. The scientists stressed that most adults require somewhere between seven and eight hours every night and they recommended limiting nighttime driving as much as possible.
So what does FMCSA do, despite mountains of evidence? It continues to allow drivers to split their sleeper time in two intervals of no less than two hours and makes no distinction between day and night work.

By way of explanation, the FMCSA offered the following: “In light of the agency’s recently completed research, the very strong opposition and persuasive arguments presented [against requiring drivers to accumulate their rest in a single consecutive interval], the agency will continue to allow single drivers to accumulate their required time off duty in two sleeper berth periods.”

Talk about hypocrisy.

The FMCSA wants to hold drivers accountable for something like a spelling mistake or being an hour or two off
in the logbook and then it tosses science behind fatigue management in favour of
flexibility.

Many drivers like the flexibility offered by the split-sleeper provision. And we can argue the merits of napping versus a full and proper sleep period. But I still applaud Transport Canada for holding to that bit of scientific evidence and achieving a degree of operational flexibility through the 48-hour averaging provision.

I’m not advocating anarchy. Take away the time/distance limitations imposed by HOS and the ability to stay awake for days at a time becomes a competitive advantage. I certainly wouldn’t want to see stamina become a job qualification and neither would I be happy wondering how long that truck in the next lane has been cruising along in high gear.
And I should give FMCSA credit: This plan is far from a well-formulated fatigue-
management strategy that encourages drivers to use
discretion, but it’s workable. No individual’s sleep needs are identical to another’s, and apparently no sector of the industry has the same operational considerations when it comes to driver scheduling.

It stands to reason that a one-size-fits-all approach to driver hours isn’t going to work, either. But that’s what we’ve got.

If there really is a desire to eliminate fatigue-related carnage from the highways, then one positive step would be to eliminate the incentives that exist to break the rules. s

A former owner-operator,
Jim Park is editor of highwaySTAR magazine. He is a regular
contributor to Today’s Trucking.