Most fleet managers who have tried to digest the revised U.S. hours-of-service rules believe the 10 hours of rest and the promotion of a 24-hour clock will help prevent driver fatigue. The extra hour of driving time and the 34-hour voluntary restart will in most cases mean no penalty in terms of productivity, despite a shorter overall workday.

However, the fact that the 14-hour workday must be consecutive may mean changes in driver scheduling and loading/unloading practices, with increased use of drop-and-hook operations and the sleeper berth split.

Because the rules don’t allow a driver to log waiting and non-driving time as off-duty, some fleet managers are bracing for what may be the most critical recruiting and retention hurdle it has ever faced.

One way to mitigate the lost time is to use more team drivers. But in reality, says Scott Johnston, president of Saskatoon-based Yanke Group, the pool of new team drivers just doesn’t exist. Johnston, whose company hauls mostly general and expedited freight into all 48 states, knows a thing or two about teams. His company employs 125 of them and has openings for 40 more.

“We can’t find one qualified guy to drive a single truck, let alone two,” he says. “There are fewer teams today than there were even five years ago. If anyone feels there are a substantial amount of drivers that will team, they’re definitely fooled.

“Trying to find two drivers to derive an income to sustain two households off of one asset, it just won’t happen.”

Making the human resource issue even more complex-not just for teams, but also for all individual drivers and operators-will be the lost income for drivers getting paid by the mile. On a long highway trip, the 11-hour driving limit may help operators earn a little more.

But in vocations where a day is filled with drops, time spent waiting instead of driving won’t be recoverable.

“The industry is in a situation where we’re going to lose (drivers) anyway, because of the demographics of our aging workforce,” Johnston says. “We’re going to lose them a heck of a lot quicker because of this, from both a lost income and increased regulation standpoint.”

The answers seem evident, but as usual, difficult to apply: pay drivers a salary, compensate them for waiting time, and pass the cost on to the customer.
“Nobody in the trucking industry is going to be able to cross-subsidize or absorb these costs alone and survive,” Johnston says.

“Even the little guy who isn’t disciplined enough or has the capacity to take on that approach will lose his operators to other industries or to carriers that pay the waiting time.”

Whether the shipping community will pay remains to be seen. In the meantime, the largest trucking outfits in the United States are pressuring customers to reduce time lost at the dock. At a summit on the new rules hosted by Schneider National, major truckload carriers called on shippers to lengthen delivery windows, re-engineer dock practices, pre-book loads, create more efficient trailer pools, and allow drivers to sleep in their rigs on shipper premises.

“Roughly 70 per cent of what we move is not time critical,” Johnston says. “The order replenishment system will not fall apart if the freight arrives, say, on the fifth day as opposed to the fourth day.

“So shipping organizations will either have to accept those costs associated for that extra one day, or they pay more to get expedited or a premium level of service that can no longer be accommodated by the hours of service through one operator.”