ELD for safer trucking

I am sorry but safety starts and ends with the driver. The driver has the football at all times.

 

Are you sure you are not looking at the recap?

I had a driver who accused us of messing with the ELD, adding hours to his 70, so after trying to convince him for an hour he was wrong, my manager had him drive 300 miles - truck and trailer - to come into the office, site down with safety girl and go through his logs for the last month, hour by hour and to show him the audit trail that the system has to see if there was any edits.

The system showed no audits to his logs at all.

 

And like I said, the carrier is responsible for safety.

 

When I'm booking our driver another load (regardless of hours available) I ask him how he's feeling and if he's up to it. I believe it's important to drive according to how you feel, not by how the 14 or 70 allows. The profit driven companies and naive/new drivers are a huge problem in terms of fatigued driving in my opinion.

 

So you are booking loads that violate HOS?

 

That’s not what he was implying. More like if the driver had 60 hours available to run, he wouldn’t force them to drive.

 

No, should I be? Do you have any hot tips on how to violate HOS???

Point is, just because the driver has 6hrs remaining on the drive line doesn't mean they're fit to drive another 5 or 6 hours. The worst thing I could do is tell my driver that the computer says he has the hours, so just drive. It's the drivers responsibility to let me know if he's fit to drive but it's my obligation as a business owner to hire people whose judgement I trust.

 

It was to draw out this information for others, nothing more.

The problem with others, thinking that the driver should be in absolute control of the ELD doesn't take in account how much they will squeeze time out of the clock. As a fleet owner, I am dependent on honesty, the loads are not as important as making sure everything is done within the regs to keep the state off my back. As you do, I ask and leave it up to a driver to figure it out, even though I know where the truck is, how much time he/she has remaining and what the load requires.