ATA Responds to FMCSA's Reconsideration of Hours-of-Service Regulations

As the American Trucking Associations (ATA) has communicated for the last five years, the hours-of-service (HOS) regulations, as they are currently constructed, are good safety rules. They are working and the proof is in the industry's safety performance since they took effect in 2004.

"Safety in the trucking industry has greatly improved while operating under the current hours-of-service rules," said ATA President and CEO Bill Graves. "Over the past five years we've seen a strong decline in truck-involved crashes on our nation's highways."

Figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) clearly demonstrate that the trucking industry is now the safest it has been since the DOT began keeping crash statistics in 1975. The number of truck-involved fatalities on our highways has decreased by 19 percent since the new HOS rules took effect. The number of injuries has decreased by 13 percent since 2004. These substantial safety improvements came at a time when the number of registered large trucks operating on our highways increased by hundreds of thousands of trucks and the number of miles driven by large trucks increased by more than 2 billion miles.

ATA looks forward to participating in the upcoming rulemaking process to further demonstrate how the current safety-based HOS rules are working and why they should be maintained.

The American Trucking Associations is the largest national trade association for the trucking industry. Through a federation of other trucking groups, industry-related conferences, and its 50 affiliated state trucking associations, ATA represents more than 37,000 members covering every type of motor carrier in the United States.

Source: American Trucking Associations