The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) published its much-litigated final rule on hours of service for commercial truckers yesterday. The Final Rule is attached here.
See my post of November 30, 2011 in advance of the Congressional hearing on the latest version of the proposed rule.
As to the Final Rule, the FMCSA decided to keep the 11 hour daily driving maximum in place, rather than a 10 hour limit it initially proposed. The reasoning for abandoning the proposed 10 hour limit is:
"In the absence of compelling scientific evidence demonstrating the safety benefits of a 10-hour driving limit, as opposed to an 11-hour limit, and confronted with strong evidence that an 11-hour limit could well provide higher net benefits, the Agency has concluded that adequate and reasonable grounds under the Administrative Procedures Act for adopting a new regulation on this issue do not exist and that the current driving limit should therefore be allowed to stand for now." (See page 81135 of the Rule).
The Rule also contains various charts indicating the projected costs of the various hours of service options considered. The Agency concluded that the 11 hour rule: "represents a small fraction of one percent of trucking industry revenues and is the cost-equivalent of less than a 3 cent-a-gallon increase in the price of diesel fuel to the long-haul industry."
That an economic cost-benefit won out in the final decision is indicated by this comment on why the originally-proposed 10 hour maximum was rejected: "The 10-hour limit has positive benefits in approximately half the cases, with the 11-hour limit having substantially higher net benefits than the 10-hour limit in most cases. A 10-hour limit, on the other hand might save more lives and prevent more crashes than an 11-hour limit, but at a higher cost." (Also on page 81135).
No comments:
Post a Comment