Hours-of-service revision deadline missed   

The FMCSA acknowledged that it will not meet its October 28 court settlement deadline to issue its final hours-of-service (HOS) rule. The chief proponents of the productivity-killing changes, The Teamsters union and the advocacy group Public Citizen, agreed to extend the deadline. The parties agreed to file their next status report on November 28. The American Trucking Associations and numerous federal government officials including House Speaker John Boehner have urged the Obama administration to withdraw support for the changes. The battle is not over though, and Democrats Boxer (CA), Lautenberg (NJ), and Rockefeller (WV) are lobbying the president to cut back driving hours, erroneously stating that “Fatigue is the primary factor in 30 to 40% of large truck crashes.” It is true that fatigue was a 13% “associated factor” in FMCSA’s crash causation study, but that does not mean fatigue caused the crash. The definition of an ‘associated factor’ is that no judgment is made as to whether any factor is related to the particular crash, just whether it was present.