The ATA shows some common sense as it challenges yet another driver daily logbook change that makes fleet compliance tougher.
(July 25, 2012) — The American Trucking Associations filed its opening brief in its lawsuit against the FMCSA over the agency’s hours-of-service changes.
In the brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, ATA called FMCSA’s changes “arbitrary and capricious as well as unwarranted,” adding that the new federal rules further restrict drivers’ ability to work and drive and “would add tremendous cost to the economy and undue burden onto drivers while providing minimal possible safety benefits.”
Last year, the FMCSA retained the current 11-hour daily driving limit and maximum on-duty window of 14 hours, but limited the 34-hour restart provision to once per week and will also require anyone using the provision to include two night periods of rest.
“FMCSA systematically, and without regard for science or logic, distorted the available data in order to fit it to a predetermined and arbitrary outcome,” ATA President and CEO Bill Graves said in a press release. “The brief filed today lays out this case convincingly and we believe the court will come to see the merits of our case and vacate these potentially ruinous changes.”
ATA contends that the rules that have been in place since 2004 are working well and have been a major contributing factor in the reduction in truck-involved crashes and fatalities in the last several years.
The briefing calls the agency’s cost-benefit analysis in its Regulatory Impact Analysis “a sham” and the agency’s “purported justifications contradict the evidence in the administrative record and require the agency to ignore, without any supporting basis, numerous positions it previously adopted.”
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