The FMCSA announced new regulations which will go into effect October 1, 2005, a scant forty-two days after announcement.
Fortunately, they are allowing a three-month phase-in period (through December 31, 2005) to allow for training, reprogramming, etc.
Among the more notable changes:
- 34-hour consecutive rests will always reset a driver for the 60/7 and 70/8 rules
- Sleeper splits are going to require one of the rest segments be a minimum of eight hours, while the matching split can be any combination of off-duty or sleeper time
- The 16-hour exemption can be applied twice in seven days for “local log” operators (with a 150 mile air-radius)
Eclipse’s development team has reviewed the new rules and believes that many of the “gray areas” from the previous 2003 regulations have been eliminated and simplified.
While implementing the new rules will be a substantial undertaking due to the new way in which sleeper splits function, it is our best opinion at this time that RapidLog will easily support the new regulations by the end of the transition period (Deceumber 31, 2005) and possibly much sooner.