The Agricultural and Food Transporters Conference of the American Trucking Associations released a critique Tuesday refuting allegations of safety concerns with hours-of-service exemptions.


Current law exempts ag carriers from hours-of-service regulations operating within a 100-air-mile radius from their central base of operation during planting and harvesting seasons. Similar provisions provide flexibility for other essential industries such as electric utilities and water well drilling as well as short-haul trucking operations within many states.

In April, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Aliance called for the repeal of those exemptions, following the results of a study of truck crash and out of service rates by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.

Ronald Knipling, an independent consultant with 30 years of experience in traffic and motor carrier safety, wrote a critique pointing out shortcomings of the Volpe study. Some of his major points:
* The study implicates HOS exemptions as the primary cause of higher crash rates for select groups of carriers, but in fact contains no direct information on driver fatigue or any other crash cause.
* Carriers examined in the CVSA study may differ in safety-relevant ways that have nothing to do with regulation differences. Carriers may be of different sizes, be distributed differently geographically, and use different mixes of fleet vehicles. Certainly, they drive in different roadway environments. Agricultural production under the HOS exemption occurs largely in rural areas where the overwhelming percentage of travel is on undivided roads, while divided highways in general have markedly lower crash rates.
* HOS rules are intended to reduce commercial driver fatigue and, specifically, asleep-at-the-wheel crashes. Driver fatigue as a crash cause is much less frequent in short-haul trucking operations than in long-haul operations.

"It seems unwise to base a regulatory and economic decision as significant as revocation of the short-haul agricultural HOS exemption solely on (inadequate) statistics," Knipling concluded. "Imposing new agricultural HOS regulations would likely have little measurable effect on short-haul trucking safety."

Knipling's conclusions follow a recent letter signed by 50 agricultural organizations sent to leaders of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that expresses support for maintaining the agricultural hours-of-service exemption during the transportation authorization debate.

More info: www.truckline.com/Federation/Conferences/AFTC/Pages/Default.aspx