Opinion ID: 186575
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: UMA's Remaining Claims

Text: 49 Four arguments that UMA raised during the rulemaking process and pursued on appeal remain before this court. However, none of these arguments have merit. First, UMA insists that its superior safety record warranted exempting the industry from the final rule. Second, petitioner accuses the agency of arbitrarily ignoring UMA's pleas to integrate the four areas of training identified by the final rule into the CDL curriculum. Third, UMA contends that because the industry lacked specialized training schools, it would suffer a disproportionate cost in complying with the final rule. Fourth, UMA objected to the agency aggregating the estimated crash costs derived from all of the regulated industries. Since the motor coach industry has a superior accident record and contributes less to overall accident-related costs, UMA posits, it was methodologically unsound to calculate the rule's benefits without disaggregating the costs associated with each regulated sector. 50 None of these criticisms demonstrate a failure of decisionmaking sufficient to discard the rule as arbitrary and capricious. Because they are so frail, we devote only brief attention to their specific shortcomings. First, it was not unreasonable for FMCSA to decline the UMA's request for exemption. Though the Adequacy Report did find that the motor coach industry had a better safety record than the heavy truck industry, it still found the industry's training record to be inadequate. See Minimum Training Requirements, 69 Fed.Reg. at 29,389. Next, rejecting UMA's suggestion that the training topics be integrated into the CDL requirement was a permissible policy choice. The agency was free to determine that employers, rather than state administrators, should bear the cost of the final rule. See id. at 29,388. Third, UMA's argument that it cannot afford to implement the final rule because the industry lacks a training infrastructure makes little sense, considering that UMA endorses the broader proposition that adherence to the Adequacy Report will appropriately involve more extensive training requirements than are now imposed by the final rule. Finally, UMA's objection to the agency's aggregation of crash costs seems confused. The agency used the average cost of crashes involving large trucks to estimate the average cost of all crashes affected by its rule. Id. at 29,397. Citing the motor coach industry's lower frequency of accidents, UMA seeks to discredit the agency's focus on the costs per accident generated by the trucking industry. Because UMA has not shown that motor coach accidents are less costly when they occur, the association has not demonstrated a methodological problem with the cost-benefit analysis beyond the ones already identified in this opinion.