No one likes Canada’s current hours-of-service standards. Truck drivers see them as intrusive and unnecessary, and besides, flagrant abuse of the regulations has rendered them nearly ineffective in their original intent. So how do you write rules that will accommodate not only the individual needs and concerns of millions of truck drivers, yet satisfy shippers, the cops, the public, and the politicians? In short, it’s a tall order.

Transport Canada, under direction from the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators (CCMTA) and a group of industry stakeholders has been toiling since 1996 to develop a workable solution. The answer would seem to rest in a document called a Consultation Draft for the National Safety Code, Standard #9, Hours of Service, tabled on March 28, 2001.

The proposal, written by a task force of provincial and federal regulators, calls for work-rest standards for truck drivers based on a 14-hour on-duty cycle followed by 10 hours off each day. That’s two hours more time off than the current federal minimum, giving drivers more time to rest as well as to attend to their daily lives — eat, pay bills, spend time with the family, etc. Today, drivers can work up to 15 hours (13 driving) and then must log at least eight hours off. Since this regime is based on a 23-hour rotation of on-duty/off-duty periods, drivers can legally work 16 hours in a 24-hour period. Furthermore, they may actually be required to start work one hour earlier each day. When you’re working to a 23-hour clock, that 7 a.m. starting time on Friday can migrate back to 1 a.m. on the following Thursday.

The 14/10 proposal is consistent with scientific findings concerning fatigue reduction and recovery, plus it allows for a very workable sleep/awake routine for drivers. It’s also considerably easier to understand, comply with, and enforce. But there’s a distinct possibility that the industry may lose this one in the court of public opinion.

That, my friends, would be a tremendous waste.

The CCMTA proposal is presently under examination by a parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport and Government Operations, which means the politicians who’ll decide the fate of the proposal will be doing so with fingers out in the political wind. During testimony over the past six months, committee members have been paying particular attention to what they believe their constituents will be comfortable with.

The CCMTA has no “Plan B” up its sleeve, but various parties appearing before the committee have suggested that either the current U.S. regulations or a 12-hours-on/12-hours-off rotation might be a better alternative. On the surface, both concepts appear to have some merit, but neither stands up to close scientific or economic scrutiny.

Safety, quite naturally, is at the forefront of everyone’s concern, but the industry is having a tough time explaining to the outside world why the CCMTA proposal represents the best compromise possible between safety, economics, productivity, and the driver’s need for rest and recuperation. The committee could still nix the whole thing, undermining years of research and discussion, because the proposal’s opponents did a better job of spinning their side of the argument.

Support for the proposal has been weak largely because the public seems unable to see the issue from the truck driver’s point of view. The rest comes from the lack of understanding, by darned near everyone, of the mechanics of sleep and how mountains of fatigue research have contributed to the formulation of the present proposal.

It may eventually come down to truckers themselves writing their Members of Parliament or the standing committee with their views on the proposal. With that in mind, here’s our analysis of CCMTA’s 14-on/10-off proposal to help you understand its scientific and economic benefits.

14/10 DAILY CYCLE

Much is known about the mechanics of sleep. Scientists know what happens when we sleep, what happens when we’re deprived of sleep, and they know how the recovery process takes place. Scientists also understand the natural rhythms that govern our sleep cycles (circadian rhythms) and they know what happens when those rhythms are disturbed. That’s where the experts started in drafting this proposal.

It’s widely accepted that humans need about eight hours of sleep each night. If that quota isn’t met over a period of time, the body accumulates a sleep debt. So, if we remain awake for 16 hours during the day, we’re going to sleep eight hours every night. If we shorten the sleep interval to say, six hours on each of five nights, by the weekend, we’ll have accumulated a sleep debt of 10 hours. Eventually, the body will demand a payback. The payback process is called recovery sleep, and it doesn’t work in quite the way you might think.

In recovering from a sleep debt, the body will go into a deeper sleep, not necessarily a longer sleep. In fact, the recovery sleep interval may be only slightly longer than normal. We don’t have space here to go into detail, but by studying body temperature, brain-wave activity, respiration and heart rate, scientists can map an individual’s sleep patterns, observing the changes in bodily functions, which indicate different phases of sleep, and shifts in sleep patterns that indicate an individual is in a deeper state of sleep. When allowed to, the body, predictably, manages the recovery process by sleeping more deeply over a period of two nights.

This is why the proposal specifically requires that drivers take an uninterrupted eight-hour interval of sleep every day of a duty cycle. Those eight hours are sufficient to sustain a driver’s need for sleep on a daily basis. Then, at the end of the proposed 70-hours-in-seven-day cycle, the driver is permitted to reset the accumulated hours to zero provided he or she has taken an uninterrupted 36-hour off-duty period. The 36-hour interval is intended to provide two periods of the deeper recovery sleep discussed above.
The 36-hour recovery interval was arrived at by assuming that following a day on the job, the driver is likely to jump into bed soon after finishing work. He would then rise for a period of wakefulness before spending another eight or more hours asleep prior to returning to work (9 hours sleeping + 18 awake + 9 sleeping = 36).

Today, drivers can still split their sleeper time into shorter periods totaling eight hours, but the experts know that sleep in short intervals (naps) doesn’t allow the body to cycle through all the phases of sleep necessary for a full recovery of the day’s accumulated fatigue. Many drivers might argue with this, but sleep specialists have proven it time and time again. You may awaken feeling alert and refreshed after a shorter period of sleep, but you’ll slip back into a state of tiredness sooner than you would if you’d managed a full eight hours of sleep. The science suggests that on a day-to-day basis, drivers will be better rested under the CCMTA proposal than under the present system.

TIME-ON-TASK

Under the CCMTA proposal, drivers are permitted to work only 14 hours (with a maximum of 13 driving) down from the present 15, and they’ll be required to rest for a total of 10 hours, up from the current eight. So drivers work less each day, and get more sleep at night. What could be wrong with that?

Under the present U.S. regulations, drivers are permitted to work up to 15 hours. This system allows for 10 hours of driving with up to five hours on-duty somewhere in between, and it’s quite likely that during a full day’s work, the driver will be behind the wheel during the fifteenth hour of the duty cycle. The U.S. system not only allows more total daily duty-time, but it penalizes drivers by forcing them into a three-day recovery period after reaching the weekly total. It’s economically unrealistic, it doesn’t promote productive use of a driver’s time, and it doesn’t account for the current scientific thinking on cumulative fatigue or time-on-task as a source of fatigue.

Yet critics of the CCMTA proposal seem to prefer the American model. Why? Because of the mistaken assumption that time-on-task has a bearing on fatigue. Science has proven that it does not, suggesting instead that sleep loss and circadian disruption are the more significant factors contributing to fatigue.
The CCMTA proposal deals with both of these issues.
The other difficulty with the U.S. system, and it’s a far more dangerous problem, is the shift in sleep/awake cycles that takes place over a four-day period if the driver is running long-haul and doesn’t use up some of the available on-duty time. It results in an 18- or 20-hour workday (10 driving followed by eight off), which shifts the sleep interval back by four or six hours each day. The result is a 180-degree shift in sleep/awake times over a four-day period. Simply put, that plays hell with the body’s inclination to sleep at night and be awake during the day. Here’s an example:

Day 1: Start at 10 a.m. + 18 hours (10 hours driving followed by 8 hours off) = 4 a.m.

Day 2: Start at 4 a.m. + 18 hours = 10 p.m.

Day 3: Start at 10 p.m. + 18 hours = 4 p.m.

Day 4: Start at 4 p.m. + 18 hours = 10 a.m.

This presents the problem of circadian disruption affecting the available sleep time (trying to sleep during the day) while not affording any of the benefits of a regular sleep schedule. It’s a double whammy for the truck driver.

The other option critics advocate is a 12-hours-on/12-off rotation. This option has its merits, but the question is, would the extra time off actually provide any benefit? The science suggests it wouldn’t, with the extra off-duty hours just wasted sitting around a truck stop.

With the present proposal, given 10 hours off, a driver would be able to unwind for an hour before going to sleep, have eight hours of rest, and still have an hour in the morning to shower and eat before resuming work. Twelve hours off wouldn’t offer any more sleep time than is needed, with the extra time just cutting into otherwise productive earning hours.

THE WORK WEEK

Critics of the CCMTA proposal like to suggest that drivers would be permitted — or forced, depending how you look at it — to work up to 84 hours a week. Let’s look at what they’re really saying. They’re using the word “week” in a manner that suggests a “work week,” which the average Canadian sees as 40 hours. The average Canadian never considers that commerce would grind to a halt if drivers worked a 40-hour week. Nor do they consider the safety net built into the CCMTA concept demanding eight solid hours off every day rather than the short naps currently permitted in both Canada and the U.S.

Eighty-four hours of work permitted over a seven-day period allows drivers to get where they’re going and get back again. The 36-hour layover permitted by CCMTA, as opposed to the three-day layover currently needed to re-acquire driving hours after a seven-day period, prevents drivers from being forced to spend unwanted and unproductive time away from home. The CCMTA proposal is a realistic compromise; it not only assures more rest than the present system, but the 14-and-10 rotation actually promotes regular sleep cycles.

If you think about it, Joe Sixpack, waking at 6 a.m., going to work, going out for the evening, then driving home at 11 p.m., doesn’t see a schedule like this as a problem. Joe will have been behind the wheel of his car after having been awake for 17 hours, but doesn’t see how a truck driver can manage 14 hours a day on the job. Joe knows he’s tired when he comes home from work, but doesn’t stop to consider that over the course of the truck driver’s day there are dozens of opportunities to stop and rest. The proposal even mandates two hours of break time during a shift.

As far as the 84-hour work week is concerned, under the present system, thanks to the magic of cycle-switching, a driver can log 104 hours over a seven-day period, with no guarantee that there’s sufficient opportunity for sleep of proper duration to constitute a good night’s rest. The new proposal requires drivers to bed down for eight hours solid every night, and requires two full sleep cycles (deemed by the experts to be sufficient to eliminate cumulative fatigue) before returning to work. In all likelihood, that’s more rest than Joe himself gets every week.

So, there in a nutshell is a rebuttal of the arguments posed by critics of the proposed revisions to Canada’s hours-of-service regulations. Decide for yourself if their arguments have any merit. If you believe the CCMTA proposal is a viable one, then explain it to anyone who’ll listen. Make the case by describing the science and the need to balance rest with productivity. If, on the other hand, you’re opposed to drivers working 84 hours a week on principle, imagine yourself trying to make a trip from Vancouver to Halifax in the same 40-hour week everyone else works.

To reach the Standing Committee on Transport and Government Operations, contact Richard Dupuis, Clerk, House of Commons, Room 673, 180 Wellington, Ottawa, ON K0A 1A6; 613/996-4663. Or go online to www.parl.gc.ca.