ROADMap OVERSIGHT RESTARTS
THE RESTART DEBATE A fix in the works
BY STEVE BRAWNER Contributing Writer
A legislative provision meant to
secure a better 34-hour restart rule may have imperiled the restart itself, but American Trucking Associations reports a congressional fix still appears to be on the way.
The restart rule, which was created in
2003, says that once a driver has been on duty 60 hours over seven days or 70 hours over eight days, he or she can rest for 34 hours and then “restart” the clock. In 2013, the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Administration modified the rule by allowing only one restart every seven days while requiring drivers to rest from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. two nights in a row during that 34-hour period. The trucking industry fought hard
against that new provision and, in December 2014, defunded enforcement of the rule as part of a massive “cromnibus” (continuing resolution and omnibus) appropriations bill that funded all 12 of the federal government’s annual appropriations bills. That bill created a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study that consid- ered whether the FMCSA’s change in the restart rule had any safety benefits. Then a measure passed in December 2015 that was part of another omnibus bill specifically said the study had to show the 2013 chang- es had a direct correlation with safety for them to remain in force. Because the study was not expected to show that direct corre- lation, the trucking industry thought it had won.
44 Summer 2016
Except there was one minor detail.
That part of the legislation, written by the American Trucking Associations, left out a sentence specifying that, absent such a cor-
relation, the industry would operate under the old restart rules. The Department of Transportation at one point indicated it might interpret the ambiguity to say the
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