WASHINGTON — The National Retail Federation (NRF) and its National Council of Chain Restaurants (NCCR) division joined manufacturers, shippers and transportation providers today to file an amicus brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals opposing the new federal trucking regulations on drivers’ hours-of-service.

The new regulations — which require mandatory and specified truck driver work breaks, rest periods, and changes the already existing 34-hour restart period to include consecutive nights off. Like the American Trucking Associations (ATA), the NRF and NCCR are calling the regulations ‘arbitrary and caprcious.’

“The retail industry is at the crossroads of the supply chain, interconnecting manufacturers and suppliers with vendors and customers,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said. “It is the retail industry’s responsibility to get products to market and into consumers’ hands in a safe and timely manner. Any new regulation that impedes that ability increases our transportation costs, increases consumer prices, and jeopardizes the fragile economic recovery.”

FMCSA didn’t take into account the serious economic ramifications faced by the broader supply chain community when drafting these rules,” Shay said.

“NRF and NCCR believe that the new requirements will only drive up costs, make trucking less safe, increase congestion, and ultimately hurt job growth and the economy. Any change in supply chain policy should be based solely on science and fact.”

New Approach to CSA Good, says ATA, But Problems Still Exist

ARLINGTON, VA — The American Trucking Associations (ATA) told the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) that while it supports the agency’s new process for improving Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA), the system still has serious deficiencies that must be corrected.

“ATA supports this new approach to making adjustments to the Safety Measurement System methodology,” ATA’s Vice President of Safety Policy Rob Abbott wrote.
“Previously, FMCSA occasionally made changes to the methodology with no prior explanation or announcement.”

The more open process aside, ATA said there are a couple of concerns about FMCSA’s methodology.

First, the association is concerned with FMCSA’s treatment of non-preventable crashes.

“There can be no better predictor of future crash risk than past at-fault crash involvement,” Abbott said. The FMCSA recently announced that it will spend a year conducting research before developing a process for determining crash accoundability, but the ATA is urging FMCSA to create an interim process to remove those crashes in which it is “plainly evident” that the truck driver was not responsible for the crash.

ATA said that while they support the FMCSA’s plan to establish a category to measure hazardous materials carriers, it should only be implemented after modifying and testing the methodology to ensure that carriers’ scores relate to future crash risk. Currently, ATA said in a statement, the BASIC assigns high scores to many reputable, safe motor carriers with laudable crash rates and low scores in all other categories.

“While compelling fleets to improve compliance with HM regulations is important, the more pressing need — and the goal of CSA — is to identify fleets with a greater risk of crash involvement and to change their behavior,” said Abbott. “Doing so would undoubtedly be a more appropriate and efficient use of the system.”