Making Safety History

This Editorial appears in the Jan. 25 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

 — Attributed to Bert Lance, 1977, when he ran the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for President Jimmy Carter.

Usually in Washington, as elsewhere, something has to be broken, or at least underperforming, before some branch of the government moves to repair or replace it. That being the case, you might ask why the Department of Transportation is looking to tinker around with its hours-of-service rule.

Now that we know how many miles were driven by U.S. motorists and truckers during 2008, we were able to determine that the rate of truck-involved highway fatalities during that year fell by the largest percentage since the federal government has been keeping these statistics, to the lowest level in history. (It takes the government a while to compile the data, which is why we’re just doing 2008 numbers.)

To be sure, there were still too many highway deaths, and the rate is too high, and we all need to continue to work to improve these results. But these results are terrific, a marked improvement in the drive to improve roadway safety.

And the statistics improved under the very HOS rule that critics have levered DOT into changing.

While that kind of performance might lead to accolades and back-slapping in normal times, what we find in this case is that DOT has agreed to make unspecified changes in the rule to get those critics to back off on their latest federal court challenge to the new driver work rule.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is engaged right now in a series of public hearings to take testimony on the HOS rule before it makes its recommendations to the White House later this year.

These new safety statistics reinforce our position that the HOS rule has been working and should be allowed to continue to work.

While we’d like to see a few improvements made — notably in the split sleeper-berth rule — we again urge FMCSA to preserve the HOS rule, the one that has helped bring us to the safest year in history.