Prepared Remarks for Scott Darling
FMCSA Chief Counsel
Meeting with Ohio Trucking Association
June 4, 2015

• Thank you for coming to Washington, D.C.
• I asked Larry Minor, Associate Administrator for Policy to join us.
• Before we get started, I want to personally thank and your members for all you do to power the economy. Americans deserve a safe and effective transportation system to deliver our goods and get us where we are going.
• FMCSA’s mission is to save lives by reducing crashes and fatalities involving large trucks and buses.
• We are guided by three principles:
  • Raising the safety bar to enter the industry
  • Requiring carriers and drivers to maintain our high safety standards
  • Removing high risk carriers and drivers from the road
• With more than 4,000 fatalities per year in crashes involving large trucks and buses, we have more work to do. 
• Let me start the discussion with a brief outline of some of the Agency’s priorities for FY 2015:

RULES

• Electronic Logging Devices – We will publish a Final Rule this fiscal year. This rule will improve hours of service compliance and help business cut paperwork, costs.
• Safety Fitness Determination – We will publish a proposed rule by the end of the fiscal year to expand use of roadside inspection data, in addition to findings from investigations, to determine a carrier’s Safety Rating. 
• Entry-Level Driver Training Advisory Committee – Last week, I attended the final meeting of the ELDTAC that reached a consensus on recommendations to the Agency to move forward with a rulemaking.

INITIATIVES

• 34-Hour Restart Study -- We are in the data collection stage of a naturalistic study mandated by Congress in the 2015 Appropriations bill. We will complete the study by end of year. 
• Beyond Compliance – We are thinking ahead about new ways to improve highway safety.  We want your thoughts on three main things:
• 1) What new safety technologies and safety management practices should we incentivize for early adoption?  
  • 2) What incentives should we offer?
  • 3) How do we monitor compliance for early adopters

We published a Federal Register Notice in April and the comment period closes on June 22. We encourage you to contribute your thoughts.

• Driver Recognition -- We are happy to be working with industry to recognize the huge numbers of safe drivers doing good work every day.  Poster being created to hang in DOT HQ.

Other Points of Interest

• Crash Weighting – We are looking at how to address the issue of weighting of crash data in the agency’s systems based on the carrier’s role in a crash.
  • We submitted the report to Congress in January and published a Federal Register notice seeking public input on the next steps. 
  • The public comment period has closed and we received 54 comments.  We encourage you to continue to share your thoughts.
• Financial Responsibility – We are gathering information but have not decided the next steps on the issue of financial responsibility for commercial carriers.
• We issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) seeking public input and received more than 2,000 comments.
• With that brief intro, I open the floor to discussion.