Trucker Nation Director of Communications Andrea Marks is our guest for this edition of Overdrive Radio. Marks is no stranger to the regulatory process -- or the ins and out of running a small trucking business. She has livestock haulers in her family’s small fleet.

She's sharing here what she sees as a golden opportunity for hours of service flexibility advocates lying in plain view, in the form of the COVID-19 emergency declaration, waiving regs for emergency relief haulers of particular commodities since the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020.

There’s not just opportunity therein, though, but danger, given the September 1 changes to the emergency waiver seem to her to be designed to discourage use of the exemption and give regulators a way to control the narrative around its use. She wonders whether they anticipate a serious challenge to the efficacy of the hours of service rule itself.

Any serious challenge might depend on how many carriers are running under the exemption, and how often – a question we’ve been asking at Overdrive this week.

If you haven’t weighed in on your use of the COVID exemptions as yet, you can find the poll embedded in the post that houses this podcast here:

Also there, find responses to questions put directly to FMCSA that were promised at by end of day Friday the 16th by the agency -- early next week at the latest. Those questions:

1: What is the reasoning behind shifting the COVID-19 emergency and its waiver to exempting only the drive-time limits of the hours of service, and not the other regulations previously exempted?

2. With regard to the reporting requirement or ask of carriers – is it really a requirement or merely a voluntary ask?

3. What information exactly is being asked of carriers to report? Will FMCSA be requesting number of trips, specific logs of trips, or merely attestation that the declaration was relied on, period?

4: Has the agency considered examining crash rates of carriers who’ve used the declarations to date extensively versus other carriers who haven’t?

Andrea Marks truly believes that the COVID exemption could be hours flexibility advocates’ best chance to demonstrate the safety effectiveness of more permissive drive-time regulations, if only that data can be mustered.