30-day extension for comment period for proposed commercial vehicle speed limiters issued by DOT

A 30-day extension of the public comment period for the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s late August proposal calling for the requirement of electronic limiting of truck speeds was made official yesterday by the federal agencies.

With the extension, the new public comment deadline for the September 7 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which would require all newly manufactured U.S. trucks, buses, and multipurpose passenger vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 26,000 pounds to be equipped with speed limiting devices. It would not require retrofitting of older trucks.

DOT and NHTSA said in a statement that requiring speed limiting  devices on heavy vehicles could save lives, as well as an estimated $1 billion in fuel costs per year.  Although the government is not saying exactly what the top speed of the governors would be, the proposed ruling would require those devices to be set to a maximum speed. The proposal discussed the benefits of setting the maximum speeds at 60, 65, and 68 miles per hour, but DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx said in August that the DOT “will consider other speeds based on public input.”

News of this extension follows an early September letter written by the American Trucking Associations and several state trucking associations to DOT Secretary Foxx, asking for a 30-day extension to the public comment period to allow more time to solicit member views on the rulemaking and assemble data that underscores the associated risks the rulemaking would have on safety.

The letter explained that in the nearly ten years since ATA concurrently petitioned NHTSA and FMCSA for action on this issue, much has changed in vehicle and motor carrier safety, with various useful safety technologies having been deployed and adopted, while motor carriers have endured greater scrutiny over regulatory compliance with CSA program and the pending rollout of electronic logging devices.

“These developments, along with new state laws and speed limits, have changed the way motor carriers view and respond to safety concerns,” the letter stated. “In addition, the proposed rule’s dramatic departure from ATA’s initial petition in terms of tamper proofing, the lack of a retrofit requirement, and the Agencies’ reluctance to specify a governed speed requires additional time for ATA and its federation partners to reengage membership on these important issues.” 

At the FTR conference in Indianapolis in September, Schneider CEO Mark Rourke said that his company’s fleet has been utilizing speed limiters for 7 years, while seeing an increase in fuel economy and a reduction in crashes.

In 2012, a study issued by the DOT found that the crash rate among trucks not equipped with speed limiters was 16.4 crashes per 100 trucks on an annual basis. And for trucks with speed limiters, the crash rate was lower at 11 crashes per 100 trucks per year. Data for this study was based on more than 150,000 trucks recorded from 2007-2009, covering more than 28,000 crashes.