The long awaited revisions to the hours-of-service rule and the EOBR requirements may be published by December 31, according to FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro, as she addressed a freight transportation group in D.C. on December 1st.

According to Ferro, the HOS revisions were expected to be published this past October but remain under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“We all know that rule is at OMB,” she said, “and that rule will be published as soon as OMB is finished with its review. We’re hoping, certainly by the end of this year, that’s our goal.”

Ferro said she couldn’t discuss what was in the rule, joking that the words “hours of service [are] about as much as I can say.”

In addition to the hours rule, Ferro said the agency would have its expanded electronic onboard recorder proposal “on the street at the end of this year.”

That rule, she said, “takes us beyond what we have today, which is a remedial EOBR rule that applies a requirement for EOBRs to carriers who have a higher violation rate in their hours-of-service noncompliance and driver-log noncompliance.”

FMCSA sent its EOBR proposal to OMB on Nov. 29. The new proposal “is combined with a supporting-documents rule because the two go hand in hand in terms of what technology does and what kind of record keeping is required,” she said.

The supporting-documents rule outlines the paperwork that truckers are required to retain to back up driver logs.

Ferro added that while finishing work on the combined EOBR-supporting documents rule by the end of the year “was already our goal,” a lawsuit brought by American Trucking Associations to force publication of a supporting documents rule “underscored the importance of our goal.”

A third rule Ferro said she expects to be published in the next four weeks is the second in a series of distracted-driving regulations.

“We put in place, in less than a year, a rule that bans texting by commercial vehicle operators that took effect Oct. 27,” she said, “and we do have a proposed rule at OMB that would restrict the use of cell phones by commercial vehicle operators.”