Papantonio: Hell on Wheels – Big Rig Dangers

[GoLeft TV]

Congress recently loosened a set of rules that help keep our roads a little safer. The new rules will make it easier for truckers to stay on the road for longer hours, which will put us all at risk.

Ring of Fire's Mike Papantonio talks about the dangers of truck accidents with attorney Howard Nations.

[Tobin S.]

1. Nobody ever gets this shit straight when they talk about it

because they don't bother to educate themselves on the issue. "OMG! Four thousand people were killed in truck crashes last year! Killer truckers abound!"

Actually, in those 4000 deaths the car driver was at fault 70% of the time. Also consider that 40,000 more people were killed a year in traffic accidents that didn't involve a commercial vehicle at all. Those kinds numbers are consistent year after year.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfac/04085/index.cfm

Regarding logs, it is true that many truckers falsify logs. What is also true is that it is becoming increasingly less likely that they will do so due to the growing popularity of and soon to be mandated electronic log books. An in-cab computer is tethered directly to the truck engine's computer making it impossible to falsify logs.

Another misconception in the clip is that truckers don't get paid to handle freight. They do at the vast majority of trucking companies, and many trucking companies now days do not require their drivers to handle freight.

Trucking is hard work, and I don't think truckers get what they deserve in pay for the most part, but trucking has propelled me from poverty status and into the middle class over the years. It's a good deal for people who have limited opportunities. If you want to see truckers taking less risks regarding hours of service, simply pay them more and don't bust their balls when they are holed up somewhere taking a nap. You don't know how many times I've been rousted when I was trying to get some rest, and most of the time for no good reason.

[Red Knight]

3. So true

I work on a receiving dock and see drivers all day long.

After unloading them they often need a place to sleep or take their down time. I can send them to a truck stop 40 minutes away(and they don't often have that time because they HAVE to be down) or tell them to take their chances on a street. It's awful really. Truckers need more places to shut down. It's not easy for them.

[jmowreader]

2. The two rules they relaxed were dumb as fuck anyway

http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/208375-senate-panel-votes-to-change-trucker-scheduling-rules

At the beginning of the Obama administration, truckers were bound by "hours of service" regulations. For people employed by 7-day-per-week companies (most truckers fall into this category), here were the hours of service regulations:

You could drive 11 hours out of the first 14 hours since the start of the day. If you went "on duty" at midnight, and a lot of guys did (less four-wheeler traffic for one thing, and companies really like it if you bring them their freight at the start of their workday), you had to get all your driving done by 2 pm. You use the rest of the three hours for things like loading, unloading, inspections and "other things" truckers need to do.

You must rest for 10 hours after you finished working before you can drive again.

You could WORK seventy hours in any eight-day period. How this was done: there's a place on your log to record the number of hours you worked in each of the last seven days. Add them up, subtract from 70, and that's all the hours you can work today. Tomorrow your hours will roll up; if today is the 8th, you will list the hours you worked on the 1st thru 7th. Tomorrow is the 9th so you list the hours you worked on the 2nd thru 8th, and so on and so forth. If you have a job where you only work 8 hours per day, theoretically you'd never have to take a day off because you'd only ever work 64 hours in 8 days. Reality is a little different: over-the-road guys generally run out of hours on their 6th day of duty.

And then there's the restart: by not working for at least 34 consecutive hours, you are able to wipe the slate clean of your last week's work.

The two rules in question were instituted in 2013:

a driver must have two consecutive periods between 1am and 5am for a restart to legally reset your 70-hour clock, and
a driver may only do one restart per seven day period.

The first one actually makes things more dangerous. A LOT of guys run exclusively at night. The traffic is lighter, for one thing, and a lot of customers want their freight to arrive at the beginning of the day. If you've got a guy who is going 60mph down the road five nights a week between 1am and 5am, forcing him to do two consecutive 1am-5am stints in his sleeper berth is going to do exactly one thing: fuck up his circadian rhythms, which will make him sleepier for the first couple of nights of his week.

The second one is just stupid. Say it's the middle of January, when there's no freight and you sit for two days a couple times a week. Or maybe you did your 34-hour restart on the Tuesday-Wednesday before a long weekend and your truck decides to break something major when the mechanics have all been given three days off. There are a lot of reasons why you might NEED to shut down for two days more than once per week. The purported reason for this change is "truckers are taking multiple restarts per week to extend their workweek." I did every feasible scenario I could come up with and could not figure out how you can do this.

If the Parents Against Tired Truckers want to keep truckers from being tired, they should work toward having truckers paid a certain amount per week instead of letting per-mile pay stand.