Are you a ‘small-time pirate’ in the trucking landscape?

According to the left-leaning mag ema href=”http://inthesetimes.com/”In These Times/a/em, the potential for hours-of-service changes by the Obama administration’s FMCSA don’t matter to small-business truck owner-operators because they “compete like pirates, cutting their rates while hoping to snare some business. The lower their rates go, the longer they drive and more likely they are to turn their driving logs into dream books.”br /br /The full story is a href=”http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5188/driving_their_lives_away/”here/a, and among the other fouls this piece heaps on readers is the simply erroneous notion, in the third paragraph, that the 11th hour of driving and 34-hour restart provisions of the current rule were 11th-hour changes themselves, placed “on the books in [the Bush administration’s waning days.” It’s in fact been operational, though consistently challenged, in the trucking industry since 2004.br /br /We’re all for calling out politicians when they’ve screwed up, but it’s important to get the facts right in the process. Considering how long it’s been possible for drivers and owner-operators to keep running for that 11th hour, this emIn These Times/em story is doomed from the start for any industry participant.br /br /UPDATE: Jim Funkhouser, whose emWe Were the Zonks /embook I wrote about a href=”http://channel19.blogspot.com/2009/11/do-you-have-zonkatude-new-novel-by.html”here/a on Tuesday, tells me his “ship… er, book has come in. I will be receiving my copies in a few days.” It can be ordered securely via a href=”https://www.search-it-buy-it.com/sibi/BuyBook.aspx?vId=004amp;sku=1608441393″this link/a.br /br /emshare:/embr /a onclick=”window.open(‘http://digg.com/submit?phase=2amp;url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title), ‘digg’); return false;” href=”http://digg.com/submit”Digg/abr /a onclick=”window.open(‘http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title),’facebook’); return false;” href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php”facebook/adiv class=”blogger-post-footer”Channel 19 is the blog version of the column of the same name featured in Overdrive: The Voice of the American Trucker. Todd Dills (tdills@rrpub.com) is its author./div