ELD Mandate: Exemptions, Uneven Enforcement Obscure Impact
Citations have increased for violations related to AOBRDs during ELD transition. Graph courtesy FTR.
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It’s impossible to gauge the full impact of the electronic logging device mandate yet, between temporary exemptions and a phased-in enforcement period, and in fact we may not know the true effect on the industry until rates soften significantly, according to FTR analysts.
The ELD mandate went into effect Dec. 18 and requires most interstate commercial drivers to use devices meeting Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration specifications to track their hours of service and ensure they’re not exceeding federal limits.
How many exemptions does it take to gut a rule?
In the forecasting firm’s monthly State of Freight webinar, Avery Vise, vice president of trucking research, summarized the exemptions currently in place, including a technical reprieve for UPS and one for the Motion Picture Association of America, and noted the many exemption applications that are still pending, from agriculture retailers to power and communication contractors.
The big question, he noted, is the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s petition to exempt “small business” trucking operations of less than $27.5 million in annual revenue, which would be in fact the majority, some 95% or more, of trucking companies, Vise said.
While OOIDA’s petition includes a couple of qualifiers, in reality those would not reduce the number of fleet exempted by very many, Vise said. One was that to be exempt, carriers could not have an unsatisfactory safety rating. Vise noted that if you have an unsatisfactory safety rating and aren’t implementing a plan to correct it, “you’re out of business.”
The other qualification in the OOIDA petition was that exempt carriers would have to be able to document a proven history of safety performance with no at-fault crashes. Vise said even putting aside the fact that there’s no concrete definition of what constitutes an …Read the rest of this story
