Shortening the Long Haul

New York Times (July 30, 2007)

Federal regulators are supposed to make trucking safer, but lately they have been doing just the opposite. In a sop to the industry, the Bush administration raised the daily driving limit for truckers to 11 hours from 10. Fortunately, last week a federal appeals court struck down this misguided rule. It is time for the administration to rethink its deeply flawed approach to regulating trucking.

Safety groups have long urged the government to impose tougher standards on the industry. They have been particularly concerned about drivers’ schedules, since long hours lead to driver fatigue and significantly impair performance. The Bush administration, however, has been loosening standards as part of its larger anti-regulatory agenda.

The agency charged with regulating trucking, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, decided to increase the number of consecutive hours that truckers are allowed to drive to 11 from 10. It adopted a nearly identical standard in 2003, but it was struck down by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The court ruled that the agency had not adequately considered safety issues.

In last week’s ruling, a unanimous panel of the same court reached the same conclusion. It ruled that the agency had once again failed to offer sufficient justification for allowing truckers to drive such a grueling shift. Disturbingly, when it issued the new policy, the agency chose to overlook its own study, which concluded that the risk of a fatal crash increases sharply in the 11th hour of driving.

Trucking is far more dangerous than it should be. More than 5,000 people die every year in truck-related accidents, and more than 100,000 are injured. A major reason is that the federal government, under heavy pressure from industry lobbyists, has put too much weight on making trucking as inexpensive as possible.

Now that it has lost in court a second time, the administration should focus less on increasing the profits of the trucking industry and more on reducing the risk that poorly trained, fatigued drivers pose to the public.

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