Founder of P.A.T.T. issues scathing testimony against FMCSA over HOS

Founder of P.A.T.T., Daphne Izer, tells Senate subcommittee on HOS that FMCSA is making highways more dangerous

The Trucker Staff

12/19/2007

WASHINGTON — Attempting to address fatigue on the highways by allowing truckers to drive more hours is like allowing motorists to consume more alcohol in order to alleviate drunk driving, the founder of Parents against Tired Truckers (P.A.T.T.), told a U.S. Senate subcommittee on Hours of Service today.

Daphne Izer, who founded P.A.T.T. in 1993 after her son and three other teens were killed by a fatigued Wal-Mart driver, said “the lack of positive action by our federal government on the issue of tired truckers lies in sharp contrast to actions taken to stop drunk driving.”

In her testimony Izer contended that 97 percent of deaths in car/truck crashes involved the car occupants (not mentioning statistics that show car drivers cause most of the crashes). She also cited research by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Australian Federal Office of Road Safety that she said found 30 percent to 40 percent of large truck crashes were due to fatigue. “Even the U.S. DOT has repeatedly cited fatigue as a major factor in truck crash causation,” Izer said.

She said a 1995 “summit” organized by the Federal Highway Administration ranked “driver fatigue” as the number one issue, “Yet 12 years later and after more than 60,000 truck crash deaths and a million more injuries, truck driving, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, still remains one of the most dangerous occupations and thousands of innocent people are needlessly killed annually on our roads and highways.”

She maintained that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has “engaged in persistent denial of these scientific findings and refuses to acknowledge that it is, in fact, making motor carrier and highway safety more dangerous.”

She went on to say that FMCSA’s HOS regulations “are designed to push truck drivers to work and drive to the point where the chance of a crash is dramatically increased. …”

Blasting FMCSA’s recently issued Interim Final Rule on HOS, which kept the 11-hour driving rule and 34-hour restart portions that an appeals court had vacated, Izer said, “In effect, six different judges in two separate cases agreed that the FMCSA has failed to justify the dramatic increases in daily and weekly driving and working hours that both the 2003 and 2005 final rules allowed.

“What is even more incredible about these rules is that they directly contradict the U.S. DOT’s own statements about the dangers of exceptionally long driving and working hours made in earlier rulemaking actions on truck drivers’ HOS. In a complete reversal, hours that the U.S. DOT formerly held to be unacceptable and dangerous were now deemed acceptable in the 2003 and 2005 final rules.”

Izer added that current HOS rules push truckers “beyond the limits of human endurance. … Truck drivers should be afforded the same respect as other workers, work reasonable hours and be permitted to have sleep patterns that are in accord with normal human needs.”