Safety groups to Congress: Bush Admin. trucker hours rule must be overturned
WASHINGTON, DC (December 19, 2007) – A Bush administration rule allowing truckers 11 hours a day behind the wheel imperils both truckers and the driving public, Public Citizen told Congress and a federal court today. Public Citizen president Joan Claybrook testified about the deficiencies of the new Bush rule before a Senate subcommittee, shortly before the consumer group asked a federal court to enforce its earlier decision striking down the rule.
Government ‘Asleep at the Wheel’ Given the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's (FMCSA) blatant disregard of the courts, Congress may have to intervene and force the agency to enact an hours of service rule that scales back the amount of time truckers spend on the road, Claybrook told a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
"FMCSA is asleep at the wheel when it comes to truck safety, particularly in how it fails tired truckers," Claybrook said. Public Citizen and other safety advocates have sued successfully two times in the past three years to overturn the FMCSA rule. In a July, a federal court ordered FMCSA to come up with a new rule.
However, the interim rule issued last week is identical to the one vacated in the summer. It allows trucking companies to force drivers to spend seven or eight (depending on the company schedule) consecutive 11-hour days on the road with only a 34 hour break before they must get back behind the wheel. That could force truckers to log 88 hours driving in an eight-day period. The Bush administration has created a "sweatshop on wheels" for truckers and is ignoring glaring statistics that show 5,000 people a year are killed in crashes involving large trucks, Claybrook said. Another 110,000 are seriously injured each year in those crashes. Truckers themselves are also at risk, with more dying in crashes every year.
Return to Court
Public Citizen, along with Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways, Parents Against Tired Truckers, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters filed a motion Thursday in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit asking the court to enforce its July order, which FMCSA flouted with its interim rule.
"Drivers must have some kind of ‘weekend’ like most other American worker to recover from the exhaustion of driving long hours, to spend time with family and to enjoy some life outside of the truck cab," said Claybrook, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) from 1977 to 1981.
Also testifying before the Senate Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety and Security subcommittee was Daphne Izer of Lisbon, Maine, who founded Parents Against Tired Truckers (P.A.T.T.) after a tractor trailer driver fell asleep at the wheel and killed her teenaged son Jeff and three of his friends.
Other family members of crash victims attending the hearing to oppose the interim trucking rule were:
* Jane Mathis of St. Augustine, Fla., whose son David and his wife of five days, Mary, were killed while driving home from their honeymoon on Interstate 95 near the Kennedy Space Center by a truck driver who fell asleep at the wheel; * Ron Wood of Washington, D.C., whose mother, sister, three nephews and five others were killed in a crash caused by a tired trucker on U.S. Route 75 in Texas; * Beth Bandy of Somerville, N.J., whose father was killed two days before Christmas 2004 in a crash involving a trucker who fell asleep at the wheel on a Georgia highway; and * Larry Liberatore of Severn, Md., whose son Nick, 16, was killed in a crash involving a tired truck driver on I-95 near the Maryland-Delaware border.
