Driver dispatches to DOT: New priorities for a new secretary

With Anthony Foxx expected to come in officially this week as head of the Department of Transportation, we asked readers on our Facebook page to tell him what exactly he should make a priority relative to trucking. We know where the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has been over the past several years under DOT’s last leader, Ray Lahood: Since 2009, when Lahood took office, we’ve had the handheld cell ban, an hours rewrite that went into effect yesterday, a mandate for electronic logs that’s still under way, among other new or fulfilled prior programs long in process. We’ve had the byzantine CSA system and the myriad little changes DOT, through FMCSA, has implemented since the program’s launch two and a half years ago, including new compliance-review processes that are enabling federal enforcement officials to respond to carriers with what they see as critical safety problems quite quickly — likewise making it harder for carriers put out of service to resurface under new authorities.

Most recently, FMCSA detailed its plans for the driver-focused portion of the CSA regime very publicly, in a report to Congress you can download here. Over the nine years summarized, the agency wants to develop a Driver Safety Fitness Determination similar to what they’re doing for carriers via CSA, in essence.

“When are they going to come up with a program to do away with all these new programs?” quipped Steven Mitchell in comments on our Facebook page.

Good question.

Regardless of the potential safety-positive nature of some of these efforts (hard to argue against preventing bad actors popping up as so-called “chameleon carriers” under new authority, for one), a deluge of business-intrusive change as a fact of the trucking life these last several years is fairly self-evident. Thus, asked what Foxx should focus on, it’s no surprise some readers called for rollbacks.

“Strike down Lahood’s parting shot on the HOS,” wrote Douglas Holmes Connolly, Frank Wright adding that hours regs that “make sense, with our input,” would be most advantageous, then: leave well enough alone, “forever.”

A version of Jeff Clark’s “Gold Card Drivers” idea, modestly proposed here on the blog back in 2010 during the current hours rewrite’s comment period, surfaced, too — the notion of granting broad hours flexibility to proven safe drivers Tim W. McCollum would favor instituting after a driver reaches 3 million safe miles, when “he/she can probably figure out when he/she is tired and needs sleep.”