Exposing log book tricks

It has gotten better. The DOT have stepped up enforcement and audited many companies (mine included) in the past few years. They come in to the company office and look for logs and the supporting documents that go with each trip. If those do not match up then the company is given an official warning to clean up their act and institute a monitoring program to comply with the regulations and police their driver force internally. After a few months the DOT will return and do a follow up investigation. Hopefully the carrier has complied with the requirements of the first inspection and will be allowed to continue operating with random surprise inspections in store. If the carrier did not comply then sanctions such as fines and even closing the doors of the company can result with legal action taken against the drivers, owners, and dispatchers depending upon their involvement.

There are many ways to find out if a drivers record of duty status is correct. Everything from time stampled bills of lading, inbound/outbound record of entry and departure to a customer or company terminal, ez-pass records, fuel records, pre-pass, satellite tracking, cell phone records, and visual observations by personnel at weigh stations and state troopers that may have pulled that driver over.

The biggest violators today are the lease operators and owner operators that are making payments on their trucks. I will not go so far as to say EVERY o/o or l/o violates the hours of service but compared to their company driver counterparts they do fudge their books more often. Its pretty obvious when you see a lease truck with a satellite dome mount with the wiring hanging down with no transceiver attached that particular truck has no computer tracking it. Could be because the driver did not want to pay for the service or it could be so they do not have "big brother" watching them. I leave it to you to decide which explanation is more plausible.

As for the ways companies still compel drivers to run illegal it is a matter of pay. Be late for a load to a customer and you may have to sit until the following day to get loaded or unloaded without getting any pay for your time. Drivers learn real quick when they aren't making any money but they are still spending it for food to be out on the road. Drivers that make their deliveries on time are "rewarded" with more freight and loads than drivers that miss their appointments. Of course if you get into an accident or get caught running illegally by the police its "your fault" and you will have to pay the consequences. Dispatchers and load planners will routinely deny any knowledge of a driver being over his hours so in essence the driver is "hung out to dry."

I believe the only way to address the hos problems is to compensate the drivers for ALL their time spent on the job. If they are waiting to be loaded, they get paid. If they are fueling the truck, they get paid. If they inspect the truck or get repairs done, they get paid. In short, if the driver is away from home and in that truck, responsible for the truck and/or the contents of the trailer he needs to be compensated.

As for recording the drivers hos accurately the only conceivable way is to have EVERY truck with a tamper proof computerized monitoring system that measures speed of the vehicle, location of that vehicle (gps), weight of the vehicle, and weight of the driver in the drivers seat in constant contact with the companies main computer. Any tampering with the on board computer or transceiver would render the truck undrivable. Put all these together with commensurate pay for on duty not driving hours as well as drive times and there would be compliance accross the board.

Of course this would turn this industry up side down and the cost of goods and services would be increased considerably to the general public.

Customers would have to be billed for wasting a drivers time and force them to streamline their warehouses as well as shipping and receiving docks and practices.