Prior to 2003, interstate truckers could drive 10 hours out of a 15 hour work day.

Since 2003, truckers have been allowed to drive 11 consecutive hours a day and work up to 14 hours, followed by a 10-hour off-duty period.

Now the safety advocacy group Public Citizen is pushing for a rule limiting truckers to driving 8 hours in a 12 hour work day.

This week, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration submitted its proposed truck driver hours of service rule to the Office of Management and Budget. Details were not released, but most expect some shortening of driving and work hours.

While fatigue from long hours on the road contributes to serious accidents, trucking industry representatives say that shortening the work day will drive up shipping costs and that increasing the number of trucks on the road will increase safety risks.

Two things we can count on are that the controversy will continue in some form far into the future and that those who want to cheat will find ways to cheat.

Rosario Velez, 44, was in her minivan stopped in the I-285 emergency lane at Riverside Drive, making a phone call, when she was struck by an tractor trailer that, according to the police report, crossed over into the emergency lane to hit her.

Today, Sandy Springs police arrested Joseph Leon Golden, 43, the truck driver from El Paso, Texas. He has been charged with second-degree vehicular homicide and a lane violation, and is being held at the Fulton County Jail on $5,500 bond.

I've seen tragic cases where truckers tried to make it from Milwaukee to Tampa without required rest breaks, cases where truck drivers crashed when they fell asleep in their 18th or 20th hour behind the wheel. Paper logbooks are nearly useless in detecting such violations but we have been able to ferret them out with a variety of forensic methods.

But I don't see truckers as bad guys. I've represented a lot of them, and have spent many pleasant hours drinking coffee and swapping stories with them in truck stops. They have hard, dangerous jobs. Most are hard-working, honest people who don't fit any negative stereotypes. But there are still many who don't fully appreciate how a macho desire to push themselves beyond the legal work hours endangers the lives of other people. The hazard of driver fatigue is complex and multidimensional.

Since 2004, the number of large truck crash injuries per 100 million miles has dropped 25 percent and the truck-involved fatality rate has dropped 22 percent. The fatality rate has dropped 66 percent since the DOT began keeping those records in 1975. The most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) indicate that the truck-involved fatality rate declined 12.3 percent in 2008 to 1.86 per 100 million miles, from 2.12 per 100 million miles in 2007. Persons injured in large truck crashes went from 44.4 per 100 million miles to 39.6, an 11 percent reduction.

There is room for debate, however, as to what factors had most to do with the change. Some attribute it to a change in hours of service rules. Others may point out the decline in truck traffic due to the recession, improved safety features in vehicles, variations in data reporting, etc.

While there is some improvement in accident data, the American Trucking Association has made five suggestions to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to further combat hazards associated with driver fatigue. They are:

(1) Sleep disorder awareness, training and screening. (Raising consciousness of the problem among truck drivers is an extremely important step.)

(2) Promoting the use of fatigue risk management programs. (It has to be in the culture of the trucking companies. I've seen too many tragic cases where the trucking company management absolutely turned a blind eye to hours of service violations and driver fatigue.)

(3) Evaluating the use of fatigue detection devices. (When the driver's eye are drooping and head is nodding, it's time to pull over!)

(4) Increasing the availability of truck parking on important freight corridors. (It's one thing to say a trucker can drive only so many hours, but that driver faces a Catch-22 dilemma when there are no legal places to park when he runs out of hours.)

(5) Partnering with the trucking and shipping communities to develop an educational process that identifies for drivers the location of available truck parking. (Of course!)

These all incorporate common sense. If fleshed out with quantifiable, measurable details, they could help a lot.

Core priorities of FMCSA are to:
1. Raise the safety bar to enter the industry;
2. Require operators to maintain high safety standards to remain
3. Remove high-risk operators from our roads and highways.

CSA 2010 is to be implemented by end of 2010.
This Comprehensive Safety Analysis program is intended to measure seven key behaviors that are linked to trucking crash risk:
1.Unsafe Driving
2. Fatigued Driving
3. Driver Fitness which includes licensing and medical compliance standards
4. Crash History
5. Vehicle Maintenance
6. Improper Loading and Cargo
7. Controlled Substances - Drugs and Alcohol

New Entrant Safety Assurance Program focuses on 16 safety regulations for which a violation by a new entrant carrier would result in an automatic failure of the safety audit. Any new entrant that fails the safety audit must submit a Corrective Action Plan (CAP) in order to continue to operate in interstate commerce. FMCSA also closely monitors the new entrant during the initial 18-month period of operation and, if certain violations are discovered during a roadside inspection, the new entrant will be subject to an expedited action to correct the identified safety deficiencies.

National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners rules later this year will establish minimum training and testing requirements for all healthcare professionals that issue medical certificates for interstate truck and bus drivers. (I've seen drivers who were cleared to return to service in a 10 minute checkup by a chiropractor after open heart surgery.)

Hours of Service. FMCSA is taking another look at the controversial hours of service rule.

Electronic On-Board Recorders will be required of an additional 5,700 motor carriers as a remedial measure. (The days of "comic book" driver logs may be numbered, but making the EOBR systems tamper-proof will be the next challenge.)

Distracted Driving. FMCSA has banned text messaging by drivers while operating a commercial motor vehicle. (It's a step in the right direction.)

Drug & Alcohol Database. FMCSA is working on a database to keep up with drivers who fail drug and alcohol tests.

There's more. I commend the entire statement to the interested reader.

But a recent tragedy in West Virginia demonstrates why there is no tolerance for truck drivers operating an 80,000 pound, 18-wheeler semi tractor trailer truck when impaired by alcohol or drugs. Police there say Breazeale Norris was driving drunk when he hit a car on I-64 in December 2009. One 18-year-old boy died in the crash and three others were injured. Norris was charged with DUI causing death and leaving the scene of an accident.

About 37% of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations deals with alcohol and drug testing procedures.

49 C.F.R. § 392.5 absolutely prohibits use or possession of alcohol in operation of a commercial motor vehicle. “No driver shall . . . [u]se alcohol, . . . or be under the influence of alcohol, within 4 hours before going on duty or operating, or having physical control of, a commercial motor vehicle; or . . . [u]se alcohol, be under the influence of alcohol, or have any measured alcohol concentration or detected presence of alcohol, while on duty, or operating, or in physical control of a commercial motor vehicle.” Any driver is violation of this is placed in “out of service status” for 24 hours.

It further provides that “No motor carrier shall require or permit a driver to . . . [v]iolate any provision [of this section or] [b]e on duty or operate a commercial motor vehicle if, by the driver’s general appearance or conduct or by other substantiating evidence, the driver appears to have used alcohol within the preceding 4 hours.”

49 C.F.R. § 391.15 provides that a driver is disqualified by driving a commercial vehicle with blood alcohol 0.04% or more, or under influence of drugs, or refusing to take drug or alcohol test.

As a young Assistant District Attorney right out of law school, I prosecuted cases of both an 18-wheeler theft and theft of coils of copper cable from a Georgia Power substation construction site, right up the road from Carrollton in Haralson County. The copper theft case was the only time I've seen a packed courtroom applaud a jury verdict.

Over the years, whenever copper prices go up, copper thieves steal wire from power stations and transformers for resale on the black market. Sending semi trucks to pick up loads of copper cable directly from the manufacturer, under a fraudulent truck brokerage contract (if that is in fact what happened), is brazenly efficient.

Early this morning, a Greyhound bus ran off I-16 in southeast Georgia, westbound about halfway between Macon and Savannah. The driver ran into a ditch and then came back on the roadway, according to law enforcement reports. The driver stopped on the shoulder. Five minor injuries were reported.

The drive up I-16 between Savannah and Macon can be boring. I drive that route often, but have yet to run off the road though there have been times I pulled off at an exit for a power nap. Investigation is likely to focus on driver fatigue and driver distraction as likely causes of the incident.

But my first truck-related trial, many years ago, was when I was an Assistant District Attorney in a rural Georgia circuit. It involved the theft of a tractor trailer and its cargo, and was related to thefts of fuel from a pipeline that passed through a small town. Most of the city fathers were implicated in the overall plot which was prosecuted in federal court. However, the feds bumped the tractor trailer hijacking back down to our state prosecution team.

This week there is a news story that reminds me of that long-ago prosecution. In Missouri, law enforcement officers have broken up a tractor trailer theft ring and recovered six semi-tractors and eight semi-trailers stolen in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Maryland. Some young Assistant DA is going to have fun with that case.

Right now I'm working on a brief opposing a motion to exclude my expert witness from testifying about cell phone distraction in driving. I am scheduled to speak on driver distraction in trucking at the American Association for Justice convention in Vancouver this July. The Kentucky crash provides more material for that presentation.

Further details were not mentioned in early media reports. Often such incidents are not just simple collisions, but the roots of tragedy are found in a pattern of corporate conduct that forces truck drivers to meet impossible delivery schedules and press on when they are outside their legal hours of operation and impaired by fatigue.

The tractor trailer driver did not stop, but a witness took down information about the truck and the SC Highway Patrol was able to locate the driver. At last report, SC officials had not released information about the accident reconstruction investigation or what charges the tractor trailer driver might face.

In one, a woman was slowing to turn from Mike Padgett Highway onto 4-H Road when she was rear-ended by a speeding tractor trailer. She was reported to be in critical condition at Medical College of Georgia Hospital.

Fortunately, no injuries were reported when a dump truck jack-knifed and crashed on Bobby Jones Expressway.

Several readers of the Augusta Chronicle online edition commented about speeding log, chip and dump trucks in the area.

In the predawn darkness last Friday, a passenger vehicle struck the rear of a disabled tractor trailer parked in a traffic lane on I-5 at Burbank, California, killing the driver of the car.

Media report are unclear as to how long the truck had been parked there, and as to whether it had hazard lights activated or reflective triangles deployed to warn oncoming traffic, as required by Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. However, a comment posted on the KABC-TV web site, purportedly by a relative of the decedent, indicates that the man who was killed was commuting to work, and that there were no hazard flashers or reflective warning devices utilized on the tractor trailer.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, at 49 CFR §392.22 requires:

(a) Hazard warning signal flashers. Whenever a commercial motor vehicle is stopped upon the traveled portion of a highway or the shoulder of a highway for any cause other than necessary traffic stops, the driver of the stopped commercial motor vehicle shall immediately activate the vehicular hazard warning signal flashers and continue the flashing until the driver places the warning devices required by paragraph (b) of this section. The flashing signals shall be used during the time the warning devices are picked up for storage before movement of the commercial motor vehicle. The flashing lights may be used at other times while a commercial motor vehicle is stopped in addition to, but not in lieu of, the warning devices required by paragraph (b) of this section.

(b) Placement of warning devices—

(b)(1) General rule. Except as provided in paragraph (b)(2) of this section, whenever a commercial motor vehicle is stopped upon the traveled portion or the shoulder of a highway for any cause other than necessary traffic stops, the driver shall, as soon as possible, but in any event within 10 minutes, place the warning devices required by §393.95 of this subchapter, in the following manner:

(b)(1)(i) One on the traffic side of and 4 paces (approximately 3 meters or 10 feet) from the stopped commercial motor vehicle in the direction of approaching traffic;

(b)(1)(ii) One at 40 paces (approximately 30 meters or 100 feet) from the stopped commercial motor vehicle in the center of the traffic lane or shoulder occupied by the commercial motor vehicle and in the direction of approaching traffic; and

(b)(1)(iii) One at 40 paces (approximately 30 meters or 100 feet) from the stopped commercial motor vehicle in the center of the traffic lane or shoulder occupied by the commercial motor vehicle and in the direction away from approaching traffic.

The investigation apparently continues.