EYE ON TRUCKING: Once again, it’s the cost of diesel dominating truckers’ concerns

Diesel prices increased 29.6 percent during 2007.

By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff

1/16/2008

The year 2008 is only 15 days old, but there are already some striking similarities to 2007.

For one, Hours of Service is back in court.

For another, it appears diesel prices could be ready to skyrocket again.

We’ll deal with the latter first since the cost of fuel seems foremost on the minds of truckers these days.

For the past few days, we’ve been running a survey on our Web site — www.thetrucker.com — to poll truckers on what they believe is the most critical issue facing the industry in 2008.

We listed five choices — Hours of Service, EOBRs, diesel prices, freight availability and road congestion.

Without question, truckers are most concerned about diesel prices, and well they should be.

As of press time, over 58 percent of you who responded listed diesel prices. The second nearest concern has been Hours of Service at some 20 percent.

And by the way, those percentages have held steady during the entire time the poll has been on our site.

A quick look at our spreadsheets reveals this startling fact — diesel prices increased a whopping 29.6 percent from the first week of January 2007 until the last week in December 2007, from $2.58 the week ended Jan. 1 to $3.345 the week ended Dec. 31.

An even closer look, however, shows that diesel prices actually increased 38.6 percent from the year’s low of $2.413 for the week ended Jan. 29 to the Dec. 31 price.

Recent annual increases were 6.3 percent in 2006 and 25 percent in 2005.

Since the beginning of 2005, when the average price was $1.957, the average cost of a gallon of diesel has increased 70.9 percent.

Owner-operators are obviously the group most impacted by higher diesel price because company presidents will tell you that try as they might, generally surcharges don’t cover the entire of cost fuel purchased by independent contractors.

We don’t believe the industry will see another 38.6 percent increase in 2008.

At least we hope not, because that would place the price of diesel at somewhere around $4.60 cents a gallon.

We were a little surprised about the low vote for Hours of Service, but maybe that’s become a ho-hum topic among truckers, who are now waiting to see what the court will say about the effort by Public Citizen, Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highway (CRASH), Parents Against Tired Truckers (P.A.T.T.), Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to get the court to immediately enforce its mandate to eliminate the 11-hour driving limit and the 34-hour restart.

It’s anyone’s guess as to when the court will rule. A spokesman for the Justice Department told us that the court’s calendar is impossible to predict.

We can only hope that the court will not grant the petition.

To do so would throw the industry into chaos.

We believe the appropriate process is to let the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration accept comments per the Administrative Procedures Act and issue a final rule, which we’re sure will include the 11-hour driving time and the 34-hour restart, then let the legal process take its course.

We don’t believe that the court will ever tell FMCSA to write a rule with an eight or 10-hour driving limit nor a rule that does not include the 34-hour restart.

That would seem to place the court is a policy-making role, which is out of line with the Constitution.

Stay tuned.