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members contribute when they visit Capitol Hill.
Martinez acknowledged he was aware coming in that
there are some in trucking who perceive FMCSA in
almost adversarial terms. He has been markedly visible
and available to the trucking public since assuming the
administrator’s post. He said he learned to appreciate
the value of keeping open lines of communication
while he was a state motor vehicle commissioner, first
in New York and then in New Jersey.
“That is my inclination,” Martinez said. It’s how
he got things done, and it was what he envisioned
when he threw his hat into the ring for the FMCSA
post. Fortunately, or maybe it was part of the reason
he got the job, it is a viewpoint shared by his boss,
Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao. In fact, he
said, it’s something she insists on from all branches of
the DOT, “that we need to engage the industry to get
the best ideas that are out there from the people that
really know what’s going on.”
Breaching the wall some people in trucking have
built about FMCSA needed to be a two-way process,
and Martinez knew he had to be the one to lower the
drawbridge. He recalled less than a month after he
became administrator, he attended his first listening
session at an industry event, “and boy, did I get beat
up.”
The first phase of the ELD mandate was about to go
into full effect after a brief grace period, and that had
already ratcheted up the industrywide conversation
about the need for HOS reform. The crowd gave
it to him with both barrels. Now, he can laugh
when he remembers thinking, “What could I
have possibly done in three weeks” to have
deserved this?
He knew it wasn’t him. “What I
heard was a lot of frustration,
even to the point that they
couldn’t even articulate what
they were so frustrated about,”
Martinez said. “I felt that right
away, the drivers were like, ‘you
don’t know what we do.’
“That’s not healthy for the
industry, and it’s not healthy for
us as a regulator, because it
undermines our mission.”
FMCSA wound up doing five listening sessions
concerning HOS. Part of that was to collect comments,
but it was also to send a message, that the agency
wants input from everyone, not just the guys in the
front office.
“We got to make them feel that, yeah, we’re here,
we’re listening, and it doesn’t all have to be roses
and sunshine,” Martinez said. “Tell us what’s wrong,
because that’s the only way it’s going to get fixed.”
He added that he knew full well what a diverse
industry trucking is, but he never fully appreciated the
extent of that diversity and all the unique challenges
each segment faces.
He also thinks that by being consistently available,
consistently asking for comments, the reception he’s
received at industry events has improved, that there
is an overall acceptance that the agency genuinely
wants as much input as it can get, in every form and
from all quarters.
“I’m asking industry to engage, from the driver level,
safety director level to the C suite folks — give us
your ideas. If you have data, if you have technology
that you think is proving out, tell us what it is so that’s
something we can follow up with.”
Martinez and Heller agreed HOS revision is a great
example of what can be done when people in the
industry are engaged. FMCSA asked for input, and
thousands did so, online and in person.
“We tried to boil it down, and that’s what we articulated
in the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,”
Martinez said. “And we’ll see what comes out of the
process.”
It may seem like a long, dragged-out process,
Martinez added, and some of that is just built right into
the process. “The reason is to ensure that all parties
can be heard from, and that’s a good thing.”
But, Heller added, here we are, possibly just days
away from an NPRM. Usually, you could expect it to
take two years or more to get this far on something
like this. What’s this taken, eight months? “That is light
speed for government,” Heller said.
It’s important to consider why HOS reform has been
able to move as quickly as it has, and why the push has
happened, Heller said. People have been clamoring for
more flexibility in the HOS rules for 15 years. With the
34 TRUCKLOAD AUTHORITY | www.Truckload.org TCA 2019