Hours of Service

The hours-of-service rules set to take effect next year for truck drivers will add a significant cost to the trucking industry without providing much of a benefit, American Trucking Associations said Tuesday in a court filing.
It is the first brief ATA has filed in its lawsuit, first filed in February, challenging the hours-of-service rule that will put restrictions on the 34-hour restart that drivers can use to reset the weekly driving maximum.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration “claims that restart restrictions and the off-duty break requirement are justified by the cost-benefit analysis in FMCSA’s regulatory impact analysis,” ATA wrote. “That ‘analysis,’ however, is a sham.”
Starting in July, the restart period must include two spans from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., and drivers can only use it once per week. Additionally, drivers must take a 30-minute break before driving more than 8 hours.
“FMCSA stacked the deck in favor of its preferred outcome by basing its cost-benefit calculations on a host of transparently unjustifiable assumptions [and] therefore cannot justify the 2011 final rule on the ground that it has net benefits,” ATA wrote to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.