Commentary: Separating Electronic Logs and Hours of Service
Deborah Lockridge
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Deborah Lockridge
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Mandatory electronic logs have been a long time coming. A broad range of issues dogged the 15-year effort to draft a rule, including concerns about tampering, driver harassment, expense, and how enforcement officials would do their jobs. It was the subject of a protracted court battle.
Yet the underlying issue for many fleets really wasn’t so much the notion of using an electronic device to track driver hours — it was the hours of service regulations themselves.
Many drivers have “fudged” their paper logs for very good reasons. Maybe they were only 30 minutes from home when they ran out of hours because they got caught in a traffic jam on a highway blocked by a serious accident. Maybe they had to wait an excessive amount of time to deliver their load, despite arriving on time for their appointment. Maybe they had to drive farther to find a safe parking place to spend their required sleeper berth time. With electronic logs, fleets and drivers know they no longer will be able to get away with these types of “adjustments.”
This was pointed out to me by David Heller, vice president of government affairs for the Truckload Carriers Association, who I talked to for this month’s cover story on the electronic logging device mandate that goes into effect in December. He contends that by digging in their heels and resisting the ELD mandate, fleets are only hurting their cause for revising the HOS regs to something that better reflects the day-to-day realities of trucking.
“They need to start embracing technology,” he told me. “If we want to fix hours of service — which believe me, we’re trying to do — arguing against ELDs is not the way to do it.
“As an industry, I can’t emphasize this enough, we can’t advocate non-compliance. Nobody …Read the rest of this story
