LITTLE ROCK — A proposal to make truckers electronically track their driving hours was cited last year by U.S. House Speaker John Boehner as one of seven “job-killing” rules President Barack Obama should stop.
And, last month, Boehner’s Republican House colleagues overwhelmingly voted for a bill that would order the Transportation Department to issue the rule.
However, electronic recorders shifted from symbol of bureaucratic excess to business reality as the large U.S. trucking companies that would bear some of the $2 billion estimated cost lobbied for them. Support from industry, consumer, safety and law-enforcement groups overcame an anti-regulation stance among Republicans who control the House, resulting in the rule’s inclusion in a compromise bill authorizing highway spending.
“It was against the backdrop that all legislation is bad and all regulations are bad,” said Dan Osterberg, vice president of safety and security at Schneider National Inc., the second-largest U.S. truckload carrier by revenue. “The reality is they’re not all bad. There are instances where public safety needs to be a trump card.”
The House, separately the same day, reasserted Republicans’ distaste for regulations by passing, on a voice vote, an amendment to the Transportation Department budget that cuts funding to implement the trucking mandate.
There isn’t much chance the Democrat-controlled Senate will go along, as supporters of electronic logs such as Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, will be involved in the budget negotiations, said Sean McNally, spokesman for the Arlington, Va.-based American Trucking Associations.
“This was one last gasp after the legislative battle had been fought and won,” Mc-Nally said. “We fully expect the language of the highway bill will be the law of the land.”
The rule will require trucks to have electronic logging devices within three years that track driving hours, replacing paper time sheets susceptible to manipulation. Electronic tracking is part of a broader push to fight truckdriver fatigue and reduce accidents.
The proposal last August was among seven pending regulations with projected costs exceeding $1 billion that were criticized by Boehner.
“With our economy struggling to create jobs, it’s misguided for the federal government to be imposing so many new rules with such enormous costs, even when some of those rules may be well-intentioned,” Boehner said.
The bill including the electronic-tracking measure was passed June 29 by the House on a 373-to-52 vote, with 186 of 238 Republicans voting for it. Boehner, as often is the case with House speakers, didn’t vote.
The $2 billion price tag that drew Republican criticism represented only costs, without accounting for estimated savings, said Jackie Gillan, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a Washington watchdog group.
“Truck crashes cost us upwards of $44 billion a year,” said Gillan. “That’s a huge cost. We know fatigue is a factor, and we know paper logbooks are inefficient and they’re falsified.”
There were 3,675 truckrelated fatalities in 2010, up from 3,380 in 2009, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
As recently as 2006, there were more than 5,000 fatalities.
The Transportation Department estimated that using the devices would cost $1,984 to $2,377 per truck. Companies would save $1,965 per truck by eliminating paperwork, and fewer accidents, fatalities and injuries translated to savings of $734 to $746 per truck, the government estimated.
The congressional debate split the trucking industry. Companies with small fleets and drivers who own their own trucks bridled at the expense of on-board computers.
The measure had the most support in the Senate, where Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., had introduced a stand-alone electronic-logging bill. Lautenberg worked to include the provision in the transportation bill.
Two House supporters, Georgia Democrat John Lewis and Virginia Republican Frank Wolf, wrote conferees in both chambers urging them to back electronic logging.
The recorders automatically log a driver’s time behind the wheel after a truck starts moving, tracking whether drivers exceed the 11-hour daily limit. Drivers enter a code to time when they’re off-duty, loading or unloading.
Most big trucking companies already use tracking devices and want to push smaller competitors into the expense of new rules and equipment, said David Owen, president of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies in Hendersonville, Tenn.
“It’s exasperating,” Owen said. “The people making the rules do not understand the business they regulate. They assume the small guys are the safety problem, when it’s the exact opposite.”
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents more than 150,000 drivers, was opposed. Many of its members contract with bigger companies and will foot the bill for being tracked more closely, the Grain Valley, Mo.-based group said.
Supporters countered that Continental AG, an auto-parts maker based in Hanover, Germany, was selling its electronic logging system in the U.S. this year for $499, or less than 0.5 percent of the cost of a new big rig.
XATA Corp. installs logging computers for free, then charges a monthly fee of about $35 to generate reports from the data, said Tom Cuthbertson, the Eden Prairie, Minn.-based company’s vice president of regulatory compliance.
Werner Enterprises Inc., based in Omaha, Neb., became the first trucking company to switch to electronic logging in 1998. It since has experienced fewer crashes and has among the industry’s lowest rates of driving-hour violations, said Jim Mullen, executive vice president and general counsel.
It’s impossible for drivers to exceed U.S. limits on driving time “without us knowing about it,” Mullen said. “We monitor hours of service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Schneider National, based in Green Bay, Wis. switched its 15,000-truck fleet to electronic logs over 10 months in 2010, Osterberg said. The company’s experience doesn’t support opponents’ concern that dispatchers could use real-time tracking data to pressure drivers to cut short rest breaks, he said.
“They’re offering opinion, conjecture and anecdotes,” Osterberg said. “It bumps up against folks like us, who have actual data and handson experience.”
Business, Pages 65 on 07/29/2012