This move increase the marginal capacity of the truck fleet. Exempting fuel haulers from the working hours requirements isn't about letting people drive 24hr s

This move increase the marginal capacity of the truck fleet. Exempting fuel haulers from the working hours requirements isn't about letting people drive 24hr straight. The goal is to let drivers and fleets absorb a delays (a routine thing in the trucking business) by putting in a 12hr driving day instead of having to park their truck because their driving hours are up or drive unsafely to make up lost time. Nobody in trucking gripes about limited working hours. The current hours per week available for work are more than enough to work at an unsustainable rate of sleep. What everyone bitches about is the electronic logging requirements that prevent them from cooking the books in order to account for delays that happen over the normal course of business. Because people can no longer cook the books they do other things that increase risk. For political and optical reasons the DOT can't exempt them from e-logs to make their lives easier. So they just exempt them from all of it. They're basically saying "if you're gonna push yourselves we'd rather you cut the smart corner and work a 12hr day than drive around like maniacs trying to fit X hours of driving in a Y hour window in order to make your books and records check out." Because fuel deliveries tend to happen during business hours (say 5am to 10pm in this case) and trucks always deadhead back to wherever they fill up this exemption is more impactful than it would be for other subsets of trucking because it lets the trucks get back to where they started and fill back up so the next day's deliveries are not pushed off schedule.