The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in August took the first step toward a potential new study on detention times within the major segments of the trucking industry.
At that time, the agency announced its plan to file an information collection request to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget titled “Impact of Driver Detention Time on Safety and Operations.”
If approved by OMB, FMCSA estimated that approximately 80 carriers and 2,500 drivers would provide data in the study to analyze the relationships between detention time and characteristics of carriers, facility locations and driver schedules (appointment times, time of day, day of week, month and season). Another analysis would examine the relationship between detention time and safety outcomes during the shifts following the detention time.
A comment period was opened for 60 days to gather input on whether the study is necessary for the performance of FMCSA's functions, ways for FMCSA to improve the quality, usefulness, and clarity of the collected information and more. The docket received 173 comments, including from several trucking organizations and a number of owner-operators.
Alpha Drivers Transportation, a Colorado-based owner-operator fleet, argued in its comments that the information collection is unnecessary -- not because detention isn’t a problem, but because the problem has already been recognized in the Biden-Harris Administration Trucking Action Plan. The TAP noted that drivers spend about 40% of their workday waiting to load and unload goods, and that detention is a driver-pay problem.
Alpha Drivers said that the real problem lies with carriers that pay by the mile. “The motor carrier industry is the only industry in which a driver works 100 hours per week, shows only 70 hours on the logbook, and gets paid at a 40-hour rate,” the company said. “And yet, FMCSA wonders whether there is a problem with detention? Is this really a question that warrants a lengthy study only to restate the obvious?”
The company noted that it pays its owner-operators on a hybrid time and mileage package to ensure its drivers are paid for any time they spend doing carrier-related functions.
